I jumped on the iPhone jailbreaking bandwagon very early when it was actually hard to do. Nowadays, it’s so easy you’d be silly not to. But for those of you that still haven’t (or have but aren’t sure what to install), these ten applications extend the iPhone beyond what Apple allows and upgrade the experience of owning an iPhone ten-fold.

1. Music Controls – Play Pandora and many other music applications in the background. Popup controls work when you double tap the home button. I use this every single day and it’s the only jailbroken application I’ve ever purchased.
2. Categories – Eliminates clutter on your screen by creating a new application and moving apps you choose (like games) into it.
3. Five Icon Dock – Believe it or not, 5 icons fit perfectly into your dock. If you’re like me and text message all the time this is indispensable.
4. Flashlight – The brightest possible flashlight you can get. Apps from the app store don’t even begin to compare to this sucker!
5. Lock Calendar – Put a calendar on your lock screen. If you’re like me and forget things, like birthdays, this will help!
6. PrivaCy – Eliminate anonymous usage stats from being sent.
7. SBSettings – Quick settings screen that allows you to swap services on/off, kill processes, free up memory, etc.
8. SpotBright – Show recently launched applications under the spotlight search menu.
9. xGPS – A free GPS tool that, while not as accurate as TomTom, is light years ahead when it comes to usability.
10. iHulu – Watch certain Hulu episodes right on your iphone. Streams over 3g. Totally cool when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be and need something to occupy your time.

I would be very excited to see something like this supported on my iPhone:

In fact, I’ve thought multiple times how instead of an “unlock code” on my iPhone (to prevent people spying on my mail, etc. if I were to lose it) I could just have some type of swipe or gesture that would unlock it for me. Swiping: Wave of the finger future. Pun intended.

Wordabble is live! I’ve submitted requests for reviews in few places. I’ve talked about it a lot in the past few posts, so I’ll keep this short and sweet to simply say: If you have an iPhone, buy Wordabble!

One of the more useful iPhone applications I’ve found and used goes beyond Apple’s SDK by installing a quick-glance menu on the iPhone’s “locked” screen. In it, you can add calendar items, mail, sms, or a variety of other things. It’s a great idea and something the iPhone is desperately missing.

So you can imagine my dismay when, after installing on my pwned (hacked) phone and thinking to myself, “this is a good product, perhaps I should buy it” I ran into a brick wall:

No. Not happening. You just can’t do this, no matter how cool your software is! This screen says two things to me:

1. Developer is overly confident that their software is the bomb, will never fail, never break, never act differently than a user might expect.
2. Developer wants distance from the users of his/her product because users like me are dumb and will contact them about stuff they just don’t want to be bothered with, like their bomb-less application crashing.

It’s great developers are finding an outlet outside of Apple’s App Store to sell applications but this one is not for me.

As Adam wrote on his blog, Wordabble is now in review on Apple’s App Store.

Once the application is available, I’ll be contacting lots of people in attempts to get reviews and (hopefully) positive talk about the application going around. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, I hope you’re excited to play!

Adam and Lindsey came up with a cool concept that Adam executed really well. It has everything an icon needs (in my opinion). It’s unique, it indicates what the application is about, and is quite aesthetically pleasing.

There are some cool things in the works like submitting scores to the servers, which means soon this thing will actually be playable in puzzle of the day mode. Since I have early access to it, I have a leg up on everyone else by having a week or so extra time!

iPhone application icons are insanely hard to make look good on a black background. Seriously. All I want is the game’s tiles on a black background and all the iPhone wants to do is layer the little transparent highlight on top of it making my tiles look like crap!

I know why I wasn’t a graphic artist in another life. I know what I want but I can’t make what I want. I just want something representative of the actual gameplay. Argh, the pain!

I won’t be buying a new iPhone tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be important to note them now and perhaps see how my viewpoint changes over time.

While I’m quite excited about the iTunes App Store and real software for the iPhone, it’ll all run just fine on mine. The only piece of software that will convince me to go iPhone 3G will be a working GPS application. Read: An actual real-life GPS application like you’d have in your car.

I figure that one is quite a ways off, if at all even possible. I’ll leave that little piece of wizardry to Garmin or another big player but I bet it would be one of the most, if not THE most popular application for the iPhone.

Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything new. Edge speeds hardly ever bother me. Most of the time I have a wifi signal. What’s the point in upgrading if you don’t get an upgrade?

After upgrading to my iPhone 1.1.1 firmware, my phones speaker went totally bezerk on me. Every time I tried making a call the speaker would just buzz and buzz. Not only would I hear it but the person on the other end would too! It was one of those radio interference buzzes you get when your cell phone is near a radio.

Odd enough, when you put the phone on speakerphone or used a bluetooth headset everything worked fine. It was only when you used the built in speaker that things went nuts. I tried a firmware restore suggested by my friend Daryl but soon after the restore it started freaking out again.

So after driving me crazy for half a week, I took my phone into the Apple store where they promptly replaced it. It was really great to have such an awesome customer service experience. Nowhere else could I have done that! I’m absolutely an apple fanboy. Thanks for not only making such a great device but also supporting it so well.

iPhone prices were just cut from $600 to a cool $400 for the 8gb iPhone. That’s $100 less than the original 4gb iPhone sold for. Not sure what that means for the 4gb iPhone but regardless you can get yourself one now for a lot less that I purchased iPhones for Fusion Bay. Shoot, that’s a third iPhone right there. We could have bought our girlfriends each one! That combined with the fact that hardware unlocking methods and easy to use application installers like installer.app are popping up everywhere means adoption of this device is only going to continue upwards.

Update 9/19/07: I’ve received my $100 Apple store credit. Not sure what I’ll buy but I sure won’t complain!