Indie musicians have a new shortcut to reach megastar status: Having their music picked up for an Apple commercial., “New Soul”, by Yael Naim, was featured in the ad for the MacBook Air. The song just debuted in the Billboard Hot 100 at number nine. Not bad for somebody nobody had heard of a few months ago.

In this regard, Apple is following in the footsteps of Levi’s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the jeans company broke many new acts with its famous TV commercials. In the UK, having a song featured in a Levi’s spot pretty much guaranteed a number one hit. And Apple knows this. Famous for driving hard deals, the Cupertino company pays a lot less than usual for its music rights. According to Ad Age, Apple paid just $80,000 for Feist’s “1234″. The normal cost would be around $300,000.

It helps that Apple is a “cool” brand. Licensing music for a Mac ad is not seen as selling out to The Man. Can you imagine, say, the Beastie Boys allowing their music to be used in a Vista commercial? Neither can we.

Not even a week passed since iPhone SDK launch and it was already downloaded over 100,000 times. Surely not every person will create ground-breaking app, even if app at all, but we certainly can expect some nice applications coming for iPhone in the near future.

Game developers and publishers were quick to realise its potential and had plenty of announcements lately. Now app developers were a bit slower. But it’s probably because they are hard at work.

A new iPhone jailbreak / iPhone unlock solution was released by Zibri. ZiPhone v2.5c seems to be the easiest and most efficient tool out there to activate, jailbreak, and unlock your iPhone.

The best part is that this iPhone hack works with iPhones of all versions: it can activate / jailbreak / unlock iPhones that run with firmwares: 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, and 1.1.4.

Since ZiPhone comes with a graphical user interface, no advanced knowledge of computers or electronics is needed. All you do is download the program (it’s available for both Windows and Mac machines), connect your iPhone to your computer, and run it.

 Furthermore, ZiPhone comes with a “refurbish” option — this feature can restore your iPhone to its original state via DFU mode (thus removing all hacks, as opposed to “restore” mode). As such, we were able to successfully upgrade to v1.1.4 and re-unlock an iPhone that was originally unlocked with a very crude v1.0.2 hack (which later didn’t want to work with newer unlockers, due to messed up baseband).
ZiPhone is definitely THE one-in-all tool for the iPhone: it’s easy to understand and use, is compatible with any version of iPhone firmware, and the best part is that it’s completely free.Direct downloads:
- ZiPhone: iPhone v1.0.0-1.1.4 activator / jailbreaker / unlocker for Windows (10 MB)
- ZiPhone: iPhone v1.0.0-1.1.4 activator / jailbreaker / unlocker for Mac (8.8 MB)

Many iPhone users want to transfer their music clips, movies, and just random videos onto their iPhone. However it’s not all that easy to do, at least when your movies library is encoded in different formats and you don’t have professional software to convert the videos into an iPhone compatible format.

That’s where Movies2iPhone by Olivier Ksikes comes in. Movies2iPhone is a completely free video converter (based on FFmpeg) for Windows-powered machines that will convert any movie you have on your PC into an iPhone compatible format, which then could be easily transfered onto your iPhone via iTunes.

 Movies2iPhone supported formats are Divx, Xvid, avi, mpeg, wmv, asf, mov, vob, and more. The software also features support for subtitles, and comes in 7 different languages. However, make sure that you have Windows XP or Windows Vista installed, as it’s not compatible with other operating systems.
Also worth noting is that this is still a beta version, so bugs are still in there: we’ve encountered a few, namely:
- The program can only process English file/folder names (so if your file is named in some other language, just give it an English name, and it will work).
- Occasionally (this bug happened while converting a 2 hour long DiVX movie) the program might give an error and appear to be closing. However, the conversion process will still be running, and as such you just need to wait patiently for it to complete.Direct download:
- Movies2iPhone v0.66 beta (2.7MB)

Posted by Josh Lowensohn

I remember a time when making ringtones used to be a very cumbersome experience. My technique of choice was to use the open-sourced Audacity then do various conversions in iTunes or Quicktime Pro by tweaking some of the advanced settings. However, the Web has spawned newer, less tedious methods. On of them, Audiko, is a particularly well-done effort, letting you grab audio tracks from your hard drive or the Web and customize them for use on your mobile phone.

While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. Audiko simply layers the entire track on one timeline, while giving you a magnified area for each minute of the song to manipulate up to a 40-second ringtone from the segment of your choice. The entire editor is overlaid on a waveform of the song, and you can toggle whether or not you want a fade on the in and out, which can be helpful if your phone doesn’t automatically do it for you.

When you’re all finished creating your pocket masterpiece you’ve got three simple download options. One will save it as a normal mp3 ringtone compatible on most major handsets, as well as an option to download the .m4r iPhone-compatible ringtone–something you normally need an application like iToner or GarageBand (both Mac-only apps) to create. There’s also a WAP-friendly URL to simply grab the audio file on your handset without having to sync to your desktop. Whatever you’ve created gets put into a pool of other songs, and you can even see and download other ringtones from the same artist that have been created by other users when you’re all done.

Edit MP3 tracks into ringtones for your phone without software or visual distractions using Audiko.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Developers site:
http://george.zjlotto.com/

This actually has some nice tools, and will have even more tools down the line, aside from having different ways to unlock. Safely, and without downgrading the bootloader. For people that want Jailbreak/Activate only for 1.1.4, they can now do this in a Windows GUI without risk.

Here’s a list of current/future tools:

Jailbreak various versions
Activate various versions
Unlock various versions with correct startup scripts (e.g. for IPSF, with seczone check to avoid permanant lock on non-IPSF)
Setup AFC2 for iPHUC
Install BSDsubsystem
Install OpenSSH for remote shell access
Install Term-vt100 in case there’s no WiFi hotspot around
Install Installer for 3rd party applications
Fix essential application issues
Apply essential patches (e.g. AppSupport and UIKit)
Options for dangerous operations for brave people (with warning)

Screen Shot:

Download:

http://rapidshare.com/files/98775099/V_iLiberty_1_1_2_15.rar

If you still don’t have an iPhone case, and pink case for some reason is not for you then you should check out Vaja cases. It’s made from durable Argentinean leather, and is probably the most customizable iPhone case ever!

The cheapest ivolution Grip holster (priced from $55) features 39 colors to choose from, ability to add belt clip and you can even engrave text or image on it, which would make a perfect gift for your beloved one.

But if $55 is too much you can choose slim bag for just $29. However if you want something more classy like i-volution SP be prepared to spend around $100. There are over 20 case designs to choose from, and each is customizable even more.So if customization is you thing head over to Vaja Cases