What‘s going on in Crested Butte in March? It‘s so good, I‘m planning my trip already.

Any guesses?

(photo from intomobile dot com)

Chris Wasser suggested Newsgator as a good aggregator for iPhone in our article about iBloglines. If you click here, you'll see the iPhone optimized Bloglines app. And, it gives insights into what's required in a GUI for iPhone.

What‘s your favorite agregator and rationale for choosing it for the iPhone?

Thanks in advance!

Swampcast My Podcast Alley feed! {pca0356783a83b0c1e558ccfceed68434d0}

Anyone know how to play Real Audio on iPhone? I did a quick search and the closest I see is to convert Real to MP3.

I tried out the new features in the iPhone 2.2 Software Update today.

• Safari: Stability improvements caught my attention.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  Zoobird, a Ning-based network for organic gardeners I've created has a tendency to crash Safari, as does Codetown, a similarly constructed Ning network I made for software developers. So far, so good. No crashes! The address box and search box share one line for added real estate. Nice.




• Google Street Views are enhanced so that you can see a 360 degree view by clicking on a map's person icon. Of course, I surfed to 4000 Millennia Blvd in Orlando, FL to see what the OrlandoJUG location looked like from the iPhone.
  
  

  
  
  

  
  
  Then, I surfed to Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. It's where we had our first meeting of the SeneJUG, the West African Java User Group. Unfortunately, Google Maps doesn't have a Street View of the University of Dakar (but you can see pictures I took on Senejug kickoff night here!) One feature I heard about was the ability to drop a place marker in a location of your choice. For example, sometimes Google Maps shows an address in the wrong location. This feature lets you correct it, and assign the location to a contact, too. You can share the location. So, I dropped a pin close to the university and the coast.
  
  

  

  Not exactly, but close! If you click CajunJUG. Bingo! I dropped a placemark on the iPhone and shared it by emailing it to myself. Just click

  
  
  To test it, I surfed to Swampcast using iTunes and listened to the Pandora podcast. Cool! It seemed almost as fast as streaming.

• A shortcut to the home screen is another new feature. With so many new apps, you can save several moves by just clicking the Home button to go back to the home screen. Nice!

photo from Truenorth, iPhoneaholic

Did you know there‘s a new release of the iPhone software? I didn‘t until today. The Un-Official Apple Website is one way to keep up. You can also look at iTunes when you sync your iPhone and check manually, since it checks for you every so often.

Another thing I discovered today while watching a 3G iPhone perform as fast on 3g as wireless is that you can get a 3g iPhone for a lower upgrade price once you‘ve had your original iPhone a year. It‘ll still cost $200 or so. And, it‘ll cost $10/mo extra for 3G and $5 for the text messages. Check with ATT for specifics. Don‘t shoot the messenger.

Cool iPhone apps: number one is cooliris, which "transforms your browser into a lightning fast cinematic way to discover the web." It lets you do a search and returns the results visually. You gotta try it yourself! It also works on the desktop.

ZiiBii: "Floats data up to your iPhone" They describe their GUI as a "river" which is an embodiment of Dave Winer's River of News! Nice.

Trace is a game you create yourself, as you go along. "It's like Line Rider meets Super Mario Brothers, has great music and a lot of clever features." Click here to see a video (I couldn't embed

OpenTable lets you make restaurant reservations online.

Freeway is a tool kit to build iPhone-specific website presentation.

And, of course, there's an Alpine (and who know what other brands?) radio available that you can plug in the iPhone, iTouch, iPod, etc and display/play playlists and media on the radio headset. So nice. And, the iPhone charges while it's plugged in. It just keeps getting better and better...

Thanks to Chris Wasser for the heads up on this stuff...and, for the ride in his Lotus Elise at lunch today...nearly green since it gets such good MPG. Click the image to die of envy at an even better photo.