A Chinese artist named PixieTea both recorded this song and shot the accompanying video almost entirely on an iPhone 3GS. The surprise? It’s actually pretty decent! See for yourself:

Through a slew of music generation apps, like DrumMeister, Bassist, iDrum, NlogSynthesizer, NESynth and iShred, plus photography software including a stop motion app and 5d2 (a remote for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR used for a few of the shots) and, of course, a laptop, PixieTea (and crew) created this 3:39 music video named “ABCD Said” from the ground up. For the skeptics in the house, apparently the story was confirmed by local media.

Truly, those of us failing to create captivating media in this day and age are either uncreative or just lazy. The tools are there, and they aren’t even all that expensive. [chinaSMACK]

Read more here:
Apple Must Feature PixieTea In Their Next iPhone Ad [IPhone]

That’s right tough guy, you heard me – The Jerky Boys are here, in a new and mobile way! Now you can have all the fun of Frank Rizzo, Jack Tors and Sol Rosenberg in the palm of your hand. Has it been a while since you’ve heard The Jerky Boys? Well, you’ve never heard them like this!

Price: $1.99
Download This App
Developers Website

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The Jerky Boys Prank Caller

Angry Birds is the best catapult game that I have ever played! With over 100 challenging levels, this game will take you days and weeks to complete! Using an enormous slingshot, launch a variety of birds into structures containing the ugly pigs! Some birds can dive through wood and glass, others can drop explosive eggs, while others can split into three speeding small birds… just to describe a few! The pigs also come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and thus, are not all easy to destroy, adding even more fun and complexity to this wonderful game! At only $0.99, Angry Birds is definitely the best game I have ever played on my iTouch. An A+ without a doubt!

Go buy it!
This article was published by iphoneapplicationlist.com

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Angry Birds

The premise of Tweet Defense is simple: The more you tweet and the more Twitter followers you gain, the stronger your tower defenses will be. Clever, though hopefully RT bonuses will come in the future. $1. [iTunes via Kotaku]

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iPhone Tweet Defense Slaughters Zombies With Witticisms [IPhone Apps]

Do you have hundreds or even thousands of music albums on your iPhone or iPod touch? If so, you might be neglecting some of your music and the folks at tapku are here to help with their new iPhone app, Attic. Think of the Attic app as a smart jukebox with a beautiful [...]



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Attic

Media streamers aren’t exactly new, but there’s another entrant to the field that works so simply and easily it should be nearly mandatory for any iPhone user. It’s called Air Video—and it’s only three bucks.

Here’s the scenario: I’ve got a NAS with about a terabyte or so of video sitting on my network. Some torrented files, a lot of DVD rips I made myself, a fair amount of random Xvid and MKV files I’ve kept for years, and quite a few h.264 MPGs that I encoded of my own work.

Now, getting videos to an iPhone is relatively easy—if you want to convert them to h.264. Toss the file into Handbrake, fiddle with a few settings, and copy the converted file into iTunes to be synced to your iPhone.

Problem is, you’ve got to wait for the video to be converted. Then wait for it to copy to your phone. Then hope you have enough space to store it. Then delete it when you’re done.

The natural solution, of course, is streaming. And several nice applications have been written that make that possible, including Orb and (which will also stream live TV if your PC has a tuner), Tversity (which can also stream to Xbox, PS3, and even DirecTV boxes). But Orb is $10; TVersity Pro is $40.

Air Video is $3. And it’s so dead simple to set up that I didn’t quite believe it had actually worked.

I downloaded the Air Video server software to my first-generation unibody MacBook Pro, pointed it at a local folder full of video, and activated it. (It’s also available for Windows.) Then I opened up the Air Video iPhone app to find a simple directory listing. Within about three minutes from first discovering Air Video I was watching a 720p episode of a television program on my iPhone, streaming over my local Wi-Fi network.

Then I pointed the Air Video server at my NAS, suspecting that something would snag. My laptop wouldn’t have the CPU power to convert the video in time. My 801.11N network would get clogged. But nope—Air Video happily chugged away, sending a real-time stream of my videos right to my phone.

I even tried watching a 13GB 1080p rip from the NAS. (Of a Blu-ray I own, thank you very much.) It worked—mostly. Air Video lost the stream occasionally, pushing the stream back in chunks as it rebuffered. Considering my laptop chokes on that file even when it’s sitting on its own hard disk, I am not surprised.

Perhaps it shouldn’t impress me as much as it does, but it completely changed the way I think about my media library and my iPhone. I already sleep with my iPhone at my side. And when the iPad arrives, I suspect it’ll be on the nightstand, too. Now every movie or television show I have sitting around will be ready to watch in just about ten seconds.

Air Video manages to be both extremely simple to use, while extremely powerful for the settings tweaker.

If a video is encoded in h.264, a format which the iPhone can play natively, Air Video simply streams it. If not, you can “Play with Live Conversion”, which uses the ffmpeg library on your Mac or PC to convert the file in real-time. (Provided your machine is fast enough. Most newer computers should be able to handle that just fine.) You can also tell Air Video to do a permanent conversion of the file to a h.264, although the real-time streaming works so well I can’t imagine you’d find the need to do so very often.

There are tons of conversion settings that can be fiddled with, as well as different bit rates for streaming. But the default settings and guesstimates made by Air Video work so well, I haven’t yet felt the need to touch them.

You can even stream outside your network if you turn on the “experimental” Remote setting. Air Video will generate a ten-digit PIN that you punch into the iPhone app which allows it to communicate with the Air Video server even when you’re away from your home network. (I suspect it is doing some sort of simple DNS-like passing of your external IP to the company’s servers, although I have not investigated this.) The takeaway is that you can watch all your movies even away from home, even over 3G. Again, this isn’t a brand new idea, but to have it all work so effortlessly in a $3 app is. (There is also a free version that won’t display all your files at once that works perfectly, should you want to test it first.)

I’ve been toying with the idea of selling my HDTV for a while. I use it, but could live without it. I’ve barely been playing console games at all over the last few months, using the TV mostly as a giant monitor connected to a Mac Mini that serves as a home theater PC. I’d been considering replacing it with an iPad, as silly as that might seem, simply because I live alone and rarely watch movies and such with guests.

I don’t know if I’ll sell the TV and the Mac Mini or not, but Air Video has made me realize that if I wanted to, I could get the same functionality on an iPad. I’ll never be without my video library again. Not bad for three bucks. [iTunes]

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Air Video, the Best iPhone Video Streamer $3 Can Buy [Lifechanger]

A new war will be breaking out on the App Store—Street Fighter IV vs. Tekken. Namco’s confirmed Tekken will be available soon for thumb-twiddling iPhone users, though the details remain as scarce as Ling Xiaoyu’s costume. [Fonehome]

Originally posted here:
Tekken Will Come to iPhone [IPhone Apps]

We’ve chronicled how Pandora was nearly wiped out by the dickish National Association of Broadcasters, but actually, it’s been a decade-long struggle to survive. Did you know founder Tim Westergreen considered a blackjack tour in Vegas to raise money? [NYT]

Excerpt from:
Pandora, the Survivor [Internet Radio]

Is the mentality justifiable that third-party protection for expensive smartphones is a must-have? Or should manufacturers try to make their phones hardier so they can be used out-of-the-box without worry?

Originally posted at Crave

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Are smartphone protective cases must-haves?

VLC Remote lets you remotely control your VLC Media Player on your Mac or PC.

Price: $2.99
Download This App
Developers Website

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VLC Remote