For those of you who, for some reason, had bookmarked http://www.ipodtoucher.wordpress.com instead of http://www.touchpodium.com, we are no longer updating this blog.

We’ve moved to http://www.touchpodium.com (redirecting from http://www.touchpodium.110mb.com), so please update your bookmarks.

This is the final story that will be posted here.

Touch Podium is getting a complete make-over tonight.

We’re switching over from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. (Google it if you’re not sure what the difference is.)

We will now be hosted on one of the most reliable hosts available, according to many reviews.

Surfing to www.TouchPodium.com should start bringing you to the new blog by later tonight mid-morning, tomorrow (January 8th). NO NEED TO UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!

The new blog is better in many, MANY ways.

Also, I’ve still got a few things I need to get done, but cannot until the DNS settings have switched over from this wordpress.com blog, to the new wordpress.org blog.

Stay tuned!

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*The URL will stay the same for both of the above.

- Touch Podium Management

In case you hadn’t noticed that little RSS icon at the top of the right-hand sidebar, we’ve got an RSS feed wherein you can keep up to date on all the latest iPod Touch news. What you may not know is that you can do this right from your jailbroken iPod Touch (or iPhone) using a little app called Mobile-RSS. Available through Installer on the Code Genocide repo (http://repo.codegenocide.com) and via your personalized Repo.sc repository, or downloadable from its Google Code page, this handy program by Dallas Brown (a.k.a. kdbdallas) is perfect for keeping tabs the latest from all of your RSS-enabled news sites — like us, for instance. Get all the latest headlines as they happen and be the first to get the scoop. Simply add http://feeds.feedburner.com/TouchPodium to your RSS feeds in Mobile-RSS and you’ll get all of the most recent headlines delivered right to your reader whenever you’re connected to the Internet.

If you like Mobile-RSS, consider showing your appreciation to the author via a small PayPal donation. You can find a link on his Google Code page. (No, this is not a paid advertisement. I just think coders that bring us quality apps should be given their props.)

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Wired had a bit to say about accelerometers, and the iphone’s upcoming SDK yesterday evening. It’s a good write up, so I figured I’d share their post with you all.

What do accelerometers, the iPhone SDK and touchscreens have in common? They’re the three big things that could see cellphone gaming have its first good year. Even the N-Gage revival finally took off on Monday, opening its doors to public testing after months of delay.

“A lot of people were inspired by what happened with the Nintendo Wii,” said Matthew Turetzky, RealNetworks’ vice president of non-PC gaming, when I spoke to him at a recent trade show. “But touchscreen is the big change, with the iPhone. It’s such a perfect technology for the casual gaming experience.”

The iPhone could see an explosion of authorized native game development later this month, when Apple releases an official software development kit. By then, thousands of owners of Nokia N81 phones will be playing a limited selection of N-Gage titles on their high-end handsets.

Touchscreens are the hot technology in cellphones, and will see attention from game developers, especially as they become standard-issue features on new models.RealNetworks is one company aiming to make a go of cellphone gaming. Though none take advantage of the new technologies, each sees it moving hugely-successful PC games to the mobile. Recent titles include Luxor 2, the sequel to a puzzle game downloaded 60 million times; MTV Cribs, a rhythm title that puts Hip Hop into the hook; and Collapse Chaos, a mobile entry in another popular franchise.”Accelerometers will remain nichey,” Turetzky predicted. “Touch will be the next big thing, and we can incorporate that technology quickly.”Ulf Wretling, a general manager at Sony Ericsson, sees things differently.”We’ve been looking into accelerometers for some time,” Wretling told us late last year. “We’ve talked to all the game developers and asked them, ‘What can you develop with this?’”Sony-Ericsson’s accelerometer-equipped K850 ($500), and the similar K910 model, both include a modern version of Atari’s classic Marble Madness, controlled by tilting the handset itself. Accessible to Java developers as a standard programmable system feature, the accelerometer is easily integrated into games and other software.While motion sensing of one kind or another is the hot technology, advanced mobile gaming also requires number-crunching chips that can output fast, console-like graphics. Phones containing powerful processors like AMD’s Imageon 2300 series are now widely available: among them are the AT&T Tilt and HTC’s Touch.

More and more titles are available, created using cross-platform tools like Java, which can be hooked up to the 3D hardware with the OpenGL programming interface.

Mobile chipset maker Qualcomm is using phone games to help pitch its own Java-like programming interface, named BREW.

“The technology, it’s already here,” said Qualcomm spokesperson Anita Hix, though she said she expects advanced visuals to put to mundane purposes like navigation before they take off in mobile gaming.

Some of the most hyped new games are being produced for Nokia’s Series 60 handsets. The N-Gage brand, almost ready to be relaunched, promises Nintendo DS-like 3D visuals and top licenses such as FIFA Soccer and Call of Duty. A public beta of the service opened on Monday.

The original N-Gage was a much-derided Nokia gaming phone launched in October, 2003. Now, however, things are different: the sticker goes on a while range of high-end Nokias, including the N73, N95, N81 and the N93.

“Games run natively, and because of that, they’re very visually stunning,” said Nokia’s Sally Vedros.

Almost 20 titles are expected for launch, costing between $10-$15. All will be hooked up to an online community, with in-game friends lists and, where appropriate, multiplayer competition.

People who already own N-Gage-compatible handsets can download firmware updates to get their game on without forking out for new hardware.

Though there’s a tendency to make mobile games compatible with even the most low-end phones, higher-powered mobile gaming is becoming more popular. Verizon wireless reports that mobile gaming revenues increased 38 percent in the first three quarters of 2007, compared to the same period last year. Motorola’s Stephen McDonnell said in one interview that he hopes to see the likes of Amazon and Google help spearhead take-up by offering mobile games for sale.

Nonetheless, other companies take a low-tech approach that runs on any old phone. GestureTek is pushing a mobile “gesture control technology” that works on millions on handsets already in Americans’ pockets.

“It’s deliverable over the air,” says Adam Schlegel, GestureTek’s lead developer. “We can target the millions of handsets which are already there. We don’t need an accelerometer.”

Named the “EyeMobile Engine,” GestureTek offers shake, rock and roll using software alone. It operates on the same principle as an optical mouse, but tracks what the phone’s camera sees instead of a sensor.

GestureTek game titles include a slalom game featuring the Crash Bandicoot stable of characters, and a bowling game that requires the same realistic swoop of the arm as Nintendo’s own version. The gesture system can also be used for less entertaining phone functions, like answering calls or changing the volume.

Other mobile gaming schemes announced recently include Sprint Arcade, the carrier’s $10-a-game download service, MySpace’s gaming channel, and Vollee, a gaming startup that plans to augment cellphones with processing power from their own servers, the results being delivered in real-time using high-speed 3G networks.

Can’t wait to see what other kind of games these companies and other freelance programmers come up with!

(Source: A Wired Story)

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Look, if you love music and listen to your iPod virtually everywhere you go, you probably want to get the best quality sound you can while you’re on the go — within your budget, anyway, right? So which ones should you buy? Cans, buds or IEMs? Active noise cancellation or passive noise isolation? Shure or Etymotic? Sennheiser or Grado? Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss. I’m not going to tell you what to buy, but I will arm you with the information you need to make an informed decision about which ones are best for you. None if this is absolutely guaranteed to snag you a top notch pair of cans, but it gets you a lot closer than you would be going in blind. First though, we need to talk about the technology and what it means to your listening experience.

The Terminology
Before we talk about hardware, we need to understand what all of the terms mean so that we can understand what it is we’re looking at when we look at the specs on a set of headphones.

Dynamic Range
This one’s easy. Dynamic range is the range of audio signal that the phones are capable of reproducing. They are typically represented by two numbers, expressed in hertz (Hz) or kilohertz (kHz). A set that lists its dynamic range as 20Hz-20,000Hz means that it is capable of producing low sounds down to 20KHz, and highs up to 20,000Hz, or 20kHz. This is pretty typical for most name-brand phones. Generally speaking, the lower the first number and the higher the second number, the better; we’re looking for the widest dynamic range, and I personally consider 20Hz-20kHz to be my minimum standard. If a pair can exceed that, so much the better.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR or S/N)
The signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR, is a bit complicated to explain without getting into a bunch of electrical and audio engineering junk, but what it boils down to is how much of the audio signal is getting through to your ears compared to the base level of electrical interference generated by the audio hardware itself (called the “noise floor”). The higher the decibel level listed here, the better — in general, because there are ways to obscure this number to make it look good when it isn’t very. (Just avoid cheap headphones and you’ll run into this problem a lot less.) What it means for you is more sound and less interference (hiss/static) coming from the device.

Impedance
A lot of people ignore this number, and yet I can’t stress how important this number really is. It seems innocent enough, but its impact can be profound. Impedance is the amount of electrical resistance, expressed in Ohms (The Ω symbol) that the headphones possess — or, thought of another way, the amount of power (“load”) that’s needed to drive the headphones. In general, the higher the impedance, the larger the magnets (see below), and the better the sound. This figure can be deceptive though because the impedance depends on the hardware you’re looking at: Full-size headphones generally require more power to drive overall than earbuds or in-ear monitors, so what you’re looking for will depend on that. For full-size cans, you will generally want to look for an impedance of 32Ω or greater. For earbuds and in-ear monitors, 16-20Ω or greater is recommended. Bear in mind however that the more power they require to drive, the more you will need to boost the volume on your iPod to achieve a comfortable listening level.

Magnets
Let’s talk a little about how speakers, and therefore headphones, work. In the main, a speaker consists of a paper or polymer cone or diaphragm (the round, conical part you see when you take off the speaker grille), an electromagnet attached to the back of that cone, and a permanent ring magnet that surrounds the electromagnet. Positive and negative wires are attached to the electromagnet, and when audio signals are sent through these wires, they energize the electromagnet with alternating positive and negative current, which in turn causes the electromagnet to be alternately attracted to and repelled by the permanent magnet. This makes the speaker cone move, which moves the air in front of it and creates sound. I’m sure you’ve looked at a woofer while music was playing to see it vibrating — maybe even held a lit match or lighter in front of it to watch the sound waves from the woofer blow it out. (I know I have.)

Until a few years ago these were all pretty standard magnets. Their size determined their power. However, recent years have seen a greatly increased use of neodymium, or rare-earth magnets. Neodymium magnets are much stronger than conventional permanent magnets — in fact, they are the strongest magnets known to man. (Some of you may have seen instructional pages or YouTube videos on home-made miniature rail guns; they use the same magnets) As a result, speakers have reduced in size and weight because much smaller magnets are needed to achieve the same results of their larger, less powerful brethren.

The ability to greatly reduce the size of magnets while maintaining or even increasing their power has made it possible to build much more high-end headphones and earbuds with even greater dynamic ranges and sound reproduction capabilities.

This is all by way of explaining that the magnet is the thing that’s responsible for reproducing the sound in your headphones, and as such it’s a pretty big deal. The more powerful the magnet, the more power it will require to drive (remember impedance?), the greater the effect it has on the cone, and the richer and more well-rounded the sound your speakers or headphones will be able to reproduce. Ideally, you want to look for headphones that sport neodymium magnets in their drivers, as these will typically produce the best sound.

Driver Size
This one’s pretty simple. The size of the driver (cone) determines how well it can reproduce sound. Larger drivers mean more expressive sound.

The Hardware
Now that we know what it all means, we need to figure out what we can buy to stuff all of that mumbo jumbo into our ears.

Types of Headphones
When it comes to headphones, you have four practical choices: Over-ear (circumaural) headphones, on-ear (supra-aural) headphones, earbuds, or in-ear monitors (IEMs, also sometimes referred to as canalphones). The difference here is in how the units deliver the sound to your ear drums. In order to fully appreciate why this matters, we have to understand how it happens.

Sound is energy. It travels in waves by vibrating molecules of air, dust, water — whatever is handy and in the way. This why sound travels so well through water (lots of water molecules to excite) and not so much through space (not much of anything to vibrate there.) Sound waves expand as they travel — like ripples in a pond — and as a result they get thinner the further they go, resulting in quieter, more attenuated sound the further you are from its source. Therefore, the closer your ears are to the sound, the clearer the sound is and the the quieter it needs to be to be picked up by your ears.

The whole point of headphones is to deliver the sound right to your ears. Headphones can get away with using much less power to deliver loud volume because they only need to move the air between the headphone speakers and your ear drums. That’s a pretty small amount of air when you compare it to conventional speakers, which move air throughout the entire room, which requires a lot more power to do. Herein lies the fundamental and most important differences in the way the four basic types of headphones work, so let’s look at each one:

Full-size headphones (circumaural and supra-aural)
Full-size headphones either fit over your ears or on them. They typically have speaker cones measured in inches because there’s still a fair bit of air between the cones and your ear drums that they need to move. This is why they require more power than buds or IEMs; larger cones, larger magnets to move the amount of air they need to in order to produce good sound. The benefit of full-size phones is that, on the whole, they are typically capable of producing the best and fullest sound available because their large cones allow them to express the greatest range of sound. The down side is their size; good ones tend to be bulky and not really suitable for use on the go. They also tend to leak a lot of sound to the outside world because compared to buds or IEMs, they’re pretty loud. The primary difference between circumaural and supra-aural headphones is that circumaural headphones fit over the ear and typically have much better noise isolation at the expense of bulk and weight, while supra-aural headphones sit on the ear and are much lighter and less bulky at the expense of noise isolation.

Open-Air vs. Sealed
One consideration when looking at full-size cans is whether to buy open-air or enclosed (sealed) models. The hardcore audiophiles feel that open-air headphones, which can pull air from behind the phones to pump into your ears, produce a nicer, richer sound than enclosed, which simply work with whatever air is available around your ears. Open-air phones also leak a lot more sound, so if that is a concern then you probably want to avoid these.

Earbuds
Earbuds fit just inside the canal openings in your ears. They have the benefit of being very small and lightweight, but the drawback is that not everyone can wear buds. I am one of these people; they just don’t fit. They generally require less power because they sit closer to your ear drums than conventional headphones, but they are not the most efficient method of delivering sound as only some of the audio is delivered to your drums; the rest is blocked by the tragus — that flap of skin and cartilage closest to your face that you sometimes push into your ear canals to block out sound just prior to yelling, “NANANA I’M NOT LISTENING!” Earbuds also suffer from poor noise isolation since they typically have no way of creating an effective barrier between your ear canals and the outside world.

In-ear monitors/canalphones
A more recent development in audio technology is the in-ear monitor. These are a lot like earbuds, but are typically angled and designed to fit directly into the ear canal via silicone or foam tips. In so doing, they form a seal. This has several benefits. First and foremost is exceptional noise isolation, usually between 25-35dB or better. When wearing IEMs, outside noise is often reduced to such an extent that you will find it difficult even to hear someone speaking directly to you. Because of this, volume levels can be moderated to a much greater degree, since you do not have to overpower outside noise by boosting the volume. Second, because the audio source is much closer to your ear drums, IEMs only need that tiny pocket of air between the tips and your drums to deliver their sound, which means you tend to get much cleaner sound with less distortion at lower volume levels than with typical buds or headphones. Third, because less power is needed, IEMs are often smaller than typical earbuds while still managing to deliver superior audio quality. Most IEMs will also come with an assortment of types and sizes of tips. Higher end Shure IEMs for example typically come with three sizes of two different types of silicone tips (hard and soft), plus a set of triple-flange tips (silicone tips with three sets of progressively larger radial fins to anchor them in place) and a set of foam tips.

The main drawback to IEMs — as it is to a lesser degree with earbuds — is that your ears do something slightly unpleasant: They produce cerumen. (That’s ear wax to the rest of you.) Because of this, IEMs need to have their tips cleaned on a fairly regular basis. If you keep your ears relatively clean with Q-Tips then this is less of a concern, but you will still need to clean those tips periodically. For foam tips — well, just try and keep your ears as clean as possible and replace them when they get too grungy. I buy them in bags of 10-15 pairs at a time for my Shure E3s, and they typically last me a few months with conscientious aural maintenance.

The other drawback to IEMs — which is not so much a drawback as it is a lack of education — is that a lot of people try them for the first time and think they sound like crap. This is most commonly because they have not inserted them properly. Yes, you actually need to learn how to insert them for them to sound good. IEMs rely on the ability to create a seal in the ear canals to block in the air pocket they need to produce good sound. If you haven’t created a proper seal, then they’re going to sound tinny and attenuated. The best thing to do with these is to try them first with the foam tips; you just compress both tips, shove them as far into your ears as they will go, and then give them a few seconds to expand. They will mold to your ear canals and provide a very good seal — not quite as good as silicone, but almost — and that will allow you to hear what they’re supposed to sound like when you create a proper seal in your ears.

Other Considerations

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) vs. Noise Isolation
Active Noise Cancellation, or ANC, is an interesting technology. Headphones equipped with ANC typically have two small microphones fitted into the outer housing on either side. These microphones “listen” to the outside noise, pass the sample data on to a noise processor, which then creates an inverse, or polar opposite version of that same noise, and feeds it into the audio stream. I know — what the hell is an “opposite noise?” It’s a bit hard to conceptualize, but yes, every noise has its opposite. Just like colours do — if you had any art classes in school then you know all about complimentary colours, and how green is the opposite (or compliment) of red and such. Sound is the same way, but instead of light waves, we’re dealing with sound waves. Sound waves, when represented visually, are just a bunch lines that make up peaks and troughs on a line. When played back, you get a particular sound. If you want to make another sound that will cancel that sound out, all you have to do is take those bunch of lines and flip them. When played back simultaneously, all of the ascending lines will be cancelled out by the second sound, which will instead play the polar opposite in a descending line, and vice-versa, which has the net effect of attenuating the sound to such a degree that you will have trouble hearing it.

This is what ANC attempts to do with headphones. It takes the outside noise, then creates the polar opposite sound wave of that noise and feeds it into the sound coming out of the headphones, which is supposed to have the net effect of interfering with the outside noise leaking into the headphones enough that it cancels it out to one degree or another. Because of the electronics required, this is typically only available on full-size headphones.

It looks pretty neat on paper, but does it work? To a certain degree, yes — but it is far from perfect. First of all, what the microphones hear on the outside of the headphones, which is unobstructed by anything, is a little different than what you hear on the inside, which is somewhat muffled by the headphone’s padding or cups. This can produce a discrepancy between the outside noise you would have normally heard without ANC, and the outside noise that the ANC is attempting to cancel out. Furthermore, if the noise that the ANC is trying to cancel out happens to correspond to frequencies in the music you are listening to, then it can cancel out parts of the music as well, which can produce undesirable distortions and artifacts, thus degrading your overall listening experience.

And finally, ANC typically either requires its own power source (batteries) or draws extra power from your device, shortening its play duration. Usually this isn’t a big deal, but it’s there just the same.

Noise isolation on the other hand is purely mechanical in nature. This is all about simply sealing your ears off from the outside world by whatever means possible. Whether it’s heavily padded cups on circumaural headphones or the sealing action of in-ear monitors, noise isolation is generally superior to (and cheaper than) its active electronic counterpart for the fact that it does not distort or alter the audio stream in any way, and with the proper materials and methods, as with in-ear monitors, you can achieve a pretty dramatic reduction in overall noise — often greater than that of ANC-bearing cans.

Noise Isolation and Hearing the Outside World
There are times when you do need to hear what’s going on outside — such as when someone is speaking to you. With IEMs, you generally don’t want to have to remove them because of the slight pain in the butt of re-inserting them and recreating that proper seal. There’s something you can do about that though. Shure makes a Push-to-Hear, or PTH module, which is included with its high-end 5-series (E5-PTH, SE530-PTH, etc.), but is also available as a separate purchase. It contains a microphone, and when you push the PTH button, it cuts off the music and lets you listen to the outside world through the mic. When you’re done, release the button and the music comes back. Pretty handy.

Noise Isolation and Your Cell Phone
Along the same lines is when you get a call on your cell while your iPod is blaring. Same problem applies here — but once again, a company called Gear4 has a product called the BluEye, which is essentially a combination wired remote/FM Radio/Bluetooth headset. Pair it with your cell phone, and then whenever an incoming call rings your cell, answer it through the BluEye and you never had to remove your phones. If you have a 5-6G iPod Video or 2-3G Nano, it will even show cal display and last caller information on your screen. (Touch and iPhone display capabilities coming once the SDK is released; for now the BluEye works, there’s no display on your screen.)

Whew. That’s about all my fingers can handle for today. I hope this has been informative and helpful in your quest for a good set of cans. If you have anything else you’d like to see added to this guide, or any questions, please feel free to fire away.

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Here at Touch Podium, we’re working hard to bring you the news as soon as it happens. Of course, this isn’t always possible. If you’ve got something you’d like to see posted on Touch Podium, feel more than welcome to e-mail any of us using the e-mail addresses listed below.

You may also use the e-mail addresses below to leave comments, criticism, concerns or suggestions to make Touch Podium a better place for us all. We want to hear what you’ve got to say, so let us hear it!

The email addresses are as follows:

Jody Mitoma (Owner): jody.mitoma@touchpodium.com
Eric March (Co-Owner): eric.march@touchpodium.com
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TheAppleTree (previously known as whitneystcharles) of iPodTouchFans recently released a theme she calls iTunes Music Skin: CommercialPlastic.

Here is what she had to say about the theme itself.

I was just kinda messing around with this today to see what I could whip up for the music player. I really like this skin overall… It kind of has a WMP-y look to it. It was difficult to get it working correctly – I found that I had to use play and pause buttons that were the same sizes as the originals, due to the fact that both the movie player and the music player pull their images from the same location. The offsets for each of these is different, however, being that you view video in landscape and music in profile. Ultimately I decided the quickest fix for this would be to include the button image in the Ipod Bar… which turned out being handier anyway, because you don’t have to overwrite the defaults every time you want to change the color of your buttons.

I uploaded the backup files if you don’t like the simple white plastic buttons that I created. I also fixed the problem with the progress bar being an ugly, white transparent color.

This is what it should look like in your video screen:

More color varieties, and instructions on how to install, after the break!

Also, I added red, black, lime, and brushed metal to this package:

She explains how to install the new buttons here:

TO INSTALL:
1.) Stick any folder ending in “Plastic” or “Buttons” in the Customize/ipodbarimages/ directory… (such as “White Plastic” or “White Plastic Red Buttons”)

2.) Stick any folder ending in “Volume Fill” in the Customize/volumefillImages directory… (Such as “Cyan Volume Fill”)

3.) Stick any folder ending in “Volume Knob” in Customize/VolumeImages directory… (Such as “Red Volume Knob”)

4.) Drag and drop the contents of the “White Plastic Play Buttons” folder into the System/Library/Frameworks/MoviePlayerUI.framework to replace the defaults

Downloads:

backups.zip
CommercialPlastic.zip
Lime Theme.zip
Brushed Metal.zip

Keep up the good work Whitney!

Can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

(Source: an ipodtouchfans thread)

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Do you go out camping much?

Well, next time you go, don’t forget your iPod Touch! – Not that you would anyway, right?

Now, when you download this specific mp3, you are capable of ridding your camping grounds of all female mosquitoes.

The sound provided above is the perfect pitch to annoy mosquitoes enough to get them to stay away.

Place the provided mp3 on your iPod through iTunes, and have it play on repeat if ever you need to rid a certain area of these pesky buggers.

Now, of course, you would have to bring exterior speakers or a dock to make this work, as the iPod Touch does not have usable speakers.

Here’s that file for you once more: No More Mosquitoes! (So sorry about all the ads on that website!)

Enjoy!

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Rather than waiting until September’s keynote and the usual iPod refresh period, Apple has decided to go ahead and release an upgraded iPhone and iPod Touch with double the capacity — and an associated price hike, according to an announcement made today by Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing. Available immediately, the iPhone is now available in 8GB and 16GB capacities for $399 and $499 respectively, while the iPod Touch is now available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flavours for $299, $399 and $499 respectively.

The timing is is a bit unusual for Cupertino’s beloved fruit, winter being traditionally reserved for MacWorld and associated Mac and related peripheral line refreshes and introductions. Nevertheless, for those (like me) who griped and whined last September when Steve announced the puny capacities of these otherwise wonderful devices, larger capacity devices are now available far sooner than anticipated. This in itself is good news, but us early high-end adopters might also feel a little bit cheated, first by that whole $20 January Software Upgrade fiasco, and now by suddenly being faced with the idea of trading our 16 gig devices in for the huge storage boost.

Decisions, decisions.

(Source: CNet Crave)

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After wrangling with multiple other forum hosts, I’ve finally managed to find one that seems to be working flawlessly thus far.

The Touch Podium Forums are back up and running, awaiting your registration.

The forums are a great place to ask questions to that you may be unsure of. We (The Touch Podium Management), as well as the other members of the board – I’m sure, will try our best to answer your questions to the greatest extent of our knowledge.

Click here to sign up today!

Hope to see you own the boards.

Also, in case you haven’t noticed already, Touch Podium got a make over yesterday – very late at night. I wasn’t feeling the blue and green “digg.com” looking skin we were using previously.

This wasn’t done purposely, but check out how similar the Touch Podium Blog and Touch Podium Discussion Boards (*once you’ve signed up and logged in) look.

* The Discussion Board theme only changes once you’ve signed up and logged in. I’m not entirely sure why.

Ahh well. Here’s to many more successful Touch Podium months.

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No, not that kind of Marathon. iPod Touch Fans member dmgmantis, a.k.a. Matt, has taken it upon himself to try and port Bungie’s venerable first-person shooter Marathon and its sequel Durandal to the iPod Touch and iPhone. He is helped both by the fact that Bungee has released the entire Marathon game triliogy to Freeware, and by the fact that AlephOne, a Windows and Mac port of the game’s engine, is an open-source project that allows the games to be run on modern hardware with optional enhanced graphics and sound. Using the source code to AlephOne, Matt hopes to be able to bring these two games to the iPod Touch and iPhone — which is good, because we’re tired of waiting for a decent, working Doom. Says Matt:

Decided to get a blog on Blogger, helps my fellow followers see how and what im doing on The Marathon Touch Project.
Yet, im just projecting it and taking a really close looks at the Source code of Aleph One before i go and port this. So far, so good.

Marathon is a real amazing game, even for 1994. Its just got such an eerie atmosphere when you’ve got the speakers up and your playing in the dark. I tried Marathon Durandal, the port for the Xbox Live Arcade, and I have to say, that is pretty amazing and well done port, i wish there was just an option to get back to the old original Marathon Hud. More eerie atmospehere with it.

Well, thats about all for today.

A further update today:

Yawn, wow, were getting somewhere on the Marathon Project. Mindfield was kind enough to start remixing some of the Marathon Music, as mp3’s, to choose as game music while you play. Yes, im still listening to Fatman.

Yes, that’s me he’s referring to. I’ll be doing what I can to contribute to the project doing what I do best: music. Whether or not I’ll be able to pull off some great sounding tunes is another matter, but if you are familiar with the original in-game tunes, it would be hard to do much worse. (Okay, I’m not being fair, considering the game was released 14 years ago, long before MP3s and large audio budgets were the norm in the gaming industry.)

The project is still in its planning phases at the moment (with the exception of the music) but I will keep everyone in the loop about its progress. Or you can just check out Matt’s blog and see for yourself, as well as have a peek at this iPod Touch Fans thread where the discussion is taking place. If you’d like to give the game a try on your rig, head on over to Bungie’s Marathon Open Source page and grab the whole thing for yourself. (Some assembly required)

(Source: Matt’s Blawg of Dewm)

ZodTTD is trickling out the updates to his coterie of software. First out of the gate is gpSPhone, the seminal (well, only) Game Boy Advance emulator for the iPod Touch and iPhone.

gpSPhone, the Gameboy Advance emulator, has been updated to v1.5.0. New changes in this release includes:

- Added support for both scaled/unscaled landscape and portrait view settings.
- Added support for firmware 1.1.3’s “mobile” user. gpSPhone should run well on 1.1.3 now.
- Added hardware accelerated scaling for better performance and look.

This release should be very stable and slightly faster. You now have the option between portrait and landscape mode. Hardware scaling gives a smoothed over looking picture, which some may prefer, with the advantage of performance.

A big thanks to Exophase, the author of gpSP, for his continued work on emulation. Without him, gpSPhone couldn’t exist.

For public domain ROMs (legal homebrew games) , head to Kojote’s great site: http://www.pdroms.de

Downloads for gpSPhone v1.5.0 can be found by visiting the Download section. It is available at the ZodTTD.com public Installer.app repo.

All you folks who earned your manhood (or womanhood) in the trial-by-fire that is the 1.1.3 jailbreak can now play rousing tournaments of Mario Kart with ease, and the scaling and use of OpenGL should make it a lot prettier.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Zod also has a cool new look for his blog that’s worth checking out.

(Source: ZodTTD)

Look. The iPod Touch and iPhone are awesome machines. For what they are and what they do, they are powerful, versatile, and chock full of style points in the usual Apple tradition. What we have seen so far on these devices has been nothing short of impressive; many of the games are tons of fun and impressive both visually and technically, to say nothing of some of the cool apps. I have no doubt that many of the apps in the jailbreak scene have sold no small number of Touches and iPhones on their own strengths. However, there is a great deal of misconception about what these little devices are capable of; they ooze so much awesome that it’s hard for some people to believe that they couldn’t play Crysis at full detail while balancing the national budget, accounting for 75% of resolved proteins for Folding @ Home, and picking out Barack Obama’s next suit.

As much as I hate to be the pin to your balloon of pride, I’m afraid I have some bad news: It can’t. Sure, these devices really are little computers, and they really are running OS X, albeit a slimmed down, very limited version of it, but they do not have the same capabilities as that big box next to your desk. It would be far more accurate to think of them as PDAs or SmartPhones, because that’s really the class they are in. (Never mind what Steve said.)

The iPod Touch and iPhone both sport a 32-bit, 400MHz processor, 128MB of RAM and a simple 3D accelerator to make all those nifty effects possible. In comparison, that’s a lot like a mid-range Pentium II or G3 Macintosh with a very basic 3D video accelerator. Now consider what would be possible on a desktop computer of that caliber, and you will have a bit of an idea of what the Touch is capable of.

Given this, it shouldn’t be difficult to realize that there are just some things that are not possible to any reasonable degree on the Touch. Some old 3D games such as Doom, Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D — maybe even Quake — are possible on the Touch and iPhone (ignoring for the moment a sensible control mechanism for a device that has no usable buttons), but anything newer or more complex than that and you’re asking for trouble. Quake II? Maybe — slowly. You might even be able to squeeze a slow rendition of Half Life in there. But Doom III? Half Life 2? Halo? Now you’re just talking crazy talk. The Touch and Phone simply don’t have the stones for it.

Emulation is an area where there are even greater misconceptions. We already have Game Boy Advance, NES and Playstation (though this is slow), and very shortly we can expect Super NES to join the growing throng. These are relatively low-powered consoles that the Touch is capable of dealing with to one degree or another. But what about PS2? Xbox? Dreamcast? Sorry — not happening. To explain why, let’s consider what emulation involves.

In its most basic definition, emulation is taking the program code from one computer and making another one capable of understanding and executing it. This is a tremendous oversimplification though, because a computer is a lot more than just a CPU. The computer doing the emulating has to be capable of completely mimicking the functionality of the other computer’s CPU, graphics processor(s), 3D processor(s) (if present), math co-processor (if present), sound hardware, BIOS, peripheral controllers, and every other thing that the other computer does, preferably down to the last minute detail if you want an accurate and compatible emulator. And it has to do all of this at the same time. Imagine if you had to listen to half a dozen people all speaking different languages, all at once, very rapidly, and having to translate every single one into English speech, Kanji logographics, Egyptian hieroglyphics, American sign language, Irish folk song, interpretive dance, and expressed as mathematical equations. Simultaneously. In real-time. Chances are that’s fairly impossible for you to conceptualize — but it should give you some idea of what an emulator has to to. It has to be able to translate each and every function of each and every component of the emulated machine into functions that can be understood and executed by the each and every component of the machine doing the emulating — all at the same time.

I shouldn’t have to tell you by now that this takes a lot of horsepower to do. The general rule of thumb is that the machine doing the emulating should be at least ten times more powerful overall than the machine it is emulating. This isn’t just measuring CPU; math co-processors, sound chipsets, graphic chipsets, memory managers, object processors, and peripheral controllers all come into play here, too. There are some optimizations that emulator developers can do to reduce the requirements of the host computer (the one doing the emulating) — high-level emulation (HLE) and dynamic recompilation (Dynarec) are techie terms that, at a basic level, can result in faster emulation. Even that only goes so far, though; in the end, it still comes down to a matter of the host machine’s horsepower put up against the high demands that emulating a particular platform’s components place on it.

Even having said all of this there is so much more detail I could go into to explain why this or that platform is or is not capable of being emulated on the iPhone or Touch, but that would require that I start spewing a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo about bus bandwidth, shaders, memory architecture, and so on, and you’d probably be bored to tears even if you could understand half of it. Let me instead generalize by saying that, as a general rule, any game console or computer platform released before, say, 1993, (or handheld platform released before 2002) can probably be emulated to a pretty high degree, but anything else will be some degree of unlikely to impossible.

I know it may disappoint you to hear this, but with the large number of misconceptions floating around about our wonderful little devices, I felt that a few weights needed to be tied to those balloons to bring them back down to Earth.

If you are one who does a lot of tooling around and constantly finding yourself restoring to 1.1.1 and starting fresh, there are some new updates to JailbreakMe.com which will be of interest:-Installs the latest version of Installer (3.0)
-Community Sources are now preinstalled
-Automatically OktoPreps (prepares for 1.1.2)
-More improvements listed here

This cuts out a few steps and sure to save a bit of time. The new processing for restoring from and back to 1.1.3 would be:

1. Restore to 1.1.1 in iTunes (shift+click Restore)
2. Jailbreak (visit Jailbreakme.com and click Install)
3. Update to 1.1.2 in iTunes (shift+click Update)
4. Jailbreak 1.1.2
5. Install BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH
5. Run Official 1.1.3 Upgrader from Install

Finally, jailbreakme updates! Now, we are just waiting for a jailbreak from them, too! (May or may not happen?)

source: a modiphone post

I was just sitting here, using the iPod touch, and things just kept coming up that I wish that it had. Here is my top five!

1. Flash - So many things use Flash, come on Apple, give it to us!

2. Copy and Paste - So, theres a URL I want to copy and paste from a webpage; can I do it? NO.

3. The Ability To Watch Videos from other places then YouTube - Yes, YouTube is nice, but there are so many other good video host’s that I would love to be able to watch from. Break, Metacafe, etc…

4. In Safari, when you go to another web page, the first one loses its cookies - I’m using Meebo, I go to another web page, and when I come back to it I have to re-login. This makes me SAD!

5. Video camera/Camera - I know this sounds REALLY far-fetched, but I really wish I could record video and take pictures on it. With the biggest screen out of all the iPods, recorded video would look really good, you could email pictures right through it from the Mail application, and you could immediately set it as the unlock screen background!

If the iPod touch had these features, I’d scream my fangirl scream really, really loud. Not that I have a fangirl scream… *cough*