For months, speculation has run rampant across the Internet about the health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.  Was he sick?  Did he have cancer?  Why did he disappear at critical stages in the development of the latest iPhone?  Well, now the Wall Street Journal seems to have an explanation for all of this behavior, and plenty more (including his gaunt figure).

Apparently, Jobs received a liver transplant earlier this spring in a Tennessee hospital.  Apparently, although he plans to return later this month, Jobs is expected to have limited duties, possibly working part time, or even handing over more duties to COO Tim Cook.

Apparently, this liver transplant was the result of a slow-growing pancreatic tumor, which was initially discovered way back in 2004.

No real explanation as to why he received the liver transplant in Tennessee, though speculation abounds that it was due to the unusually short waiting period for donor organs in that state.

[via Wall Street Journal and Forbes]

When I was a kid (waaaaay back in the 1970’s), one of the most popular toys around was the ant farm.  This was a wild contraption, made of clear plastic.  Inside was a mess of dirt, some plastic scenery, and a bunch of ants.  The fun came in as you watched the ants burrow through the dirt, monitoring their interactions and behavior.  It was one of those toys which, while we may not have realized it at the time, was both Educational and fun.   Well, now one of my favorite developers, Concrete Software, is bringing this experience…and a whole lot more directly to your iPhone and iPod Touch with the fantastic simulation  game, Ant Hill.

Ant Hill allows you to simulate not one, but two separate ant colonies: the peaceful black ants, and the more aggressive red fire ants.  You can control how many ants are on the screen at a time, the ratio of black to red ants, and even how aggressive the red ants are toward the black ants.  Be careful, the higher you raise the aggression meter, the more likely it is that the red ants will attack and devour your entire colony of black ants.  It would be nice if you could give your black ants some tools to defend themselves against the attacking red ants.

Once you have setup the colonies, you are ready to unleash them on the world.  But don’t feel like you need to just sit back and watch things move on their own.  You are kind of like a little ant-god.  You have quite a bit of influence and control over the activities of the colony.

The first tool at your disposal is the classic ant-mutilating magnifying glass.  Just hold it up to to concentrate the sun’s rays.  And…well, those of you who were once young boys know the rest.  Just like those idyllic summer days, just watch as the ants run around…quite literally burning their tails off.

Of course, if fire is not exactly your thing, then make it rain.  Although, in this game, it does not rain water.  Here, when you make it rain, rocks fall from the sky.  Giant rocks, which can crush whole colonies of ants at a time.  Use them to punish your colony, or to protect them from marauding red ants invading your colony.

Not everything in this game is designed to torture the ants, however.  In addition to dropping rocks on them, you can also drop strawberries, which the ants will simply devour.  I am not sure that feeding the ants does anything within the game, but it is pretty cool to watch the ants rip apart that strawberry.

You can even just decide to take up stakes and move your entire colony from one part of the screen to another.  There are two ways to do this.  First, you can just tap the Move Hill icon.  Doing so allows you to decide whether to build a red ant hill or a black ant hill.  Again, this warring faction idea is a good one, but in practice, it really ends up feeling very one sided since the black ants really have no means of defense or even protection.  Let alone the ability to counterattack the red ants.

Additionally, you can cause an Earthquake.  To do this, just turn on the accelerometer and give your iPhone a good hard shake.  Causing an earthquake will basically reset the game.  It destroys your ant hill, sending the entire colony of ants scattering to all corners.  They will quickly regroup, however, building a new black ant hill (but not a red one) in a random location on the screen.

Probably my least used option in the game was the path.  Just draw a line on the screen and the ants will follow the path you set.  What is pretty cool here, though, is that even after the line you draw disappears, the path remains.  The colony will continue to follow this path as long as this option is selected.  I rarely used this feature, and found it really did not add much to gameplay.

My favorite feature in this game is the race.  Just select whether to race for stones or strawberries.  This will pit the red ants and black ants against one another in a direct head-to-head competition, either devouring strawberries or moving stones across enemy lines. 

As much as I enjoyed this game, I did find that after a few times through, the seven controls you had got a bit stale.  This is a real problem with this genre of simulation games.  There is only so much you can do with it.  That is why I think Pocket God is a shining example of how these games could and should behave.  That game staves off the staleness problem by releasing a new update with a single additional feature each week.  That means every week, just as the game is starting to look stale, there is going to be something new to explore.  I think Ant Hill could learn from this lesson.  Although there have been a few updates, there have not really been any significant changes or updates in gameplay.  I think Concrete Software would do well to offer more regular updates, particularly at the gameplay level.

What I Liked:

• Unique and creative simulation game
• Fantastic animation and artificial intelligence

What Needs Improvement:

• The game gets stale without the addition of new features
• More weapons, abilities, or defenses for the black ants

Price: $0.99

Developer: www.concretesoftware.com

So long story short, I’m one of those unlucky folks who owns an iPhone 3G and wasn’t eligible for the subsidized pricing from AT&T. I bought mine on 3G Day last July just like all the fanboys and re-upped my contract like a good customer. I owned the first iPhone and prior to that I owned a bunch of other devices. I guess I just don’t pay AT&T enough a month to qualify or something… but at the end of the day I was one of the folks who couldn’t get the 3G S at a decent price until next March (yes 2010). Well, I thought long and hard about it, and I wasn’t going to upgrade until I like a dumbass stopped into the Apple store today to pick up a mini-to-VGA adapter for my Macbook.

So, after playing with the 3G S and feeling the improved speed of bouncing between apps – it became obvious that this was going to be a worthy upgrade. Keep in mind I live on my iPhone. Not on the ‘phone’ … but on the ‘i’ part of iPhone. I’m always on the web, twitter, games, notes, email, etc… so the speed increase is a big deal. So, the next thing I ended up doing was going to AT&T to wear my bleeding heart on my sleeve to see what they could do for me…

Read More …

So I took a plunge last night and just upgraded my 1st-gen iPhone to 3.0. The phone is from the US, but the unlock held through the firmware upgrade, which was painless. I was pretty psyched about all of the new features, but one thing that also struck me was how some of the best features were actually held back…with seemingly no good reason.

Why hold back, Apple?

I can take the lack of video or compass since those features have a lot to do with hardware, but why gimp voice control capability or Bluetooth stereo? As far as I know, the iPhone 1st-gen has the same processing power and memory as the 3G, and it also has the same Bluetooth 2.0. I think this must have been a purposeful crippling of the older generation devices to “inspire” people to get new devices. Well, it obviously worked on me, since I’ve ordered a 3GS, but it’s too bad they did this. I see it just like the first iPod Touch’s launch, when Apple decided that Touches weren’t worthy of having actual calendar app functionality.

More 3.0 impressions

Complaints aside, 3.0 is cool so far. I’ve noticed some definite slowdowns on my device, but it’s great to have all the little extra features. It’s surprising to see what people see as the main features of this new firmware. People at work seem to see the compass as a huge deal and a reason to upgrade, but I just see it as a useful little extra. Cut and paste is remarkably well done (about time!) and very fast, and the new Spotlight features just makes sense. I’d really love for it to search the internet a la the Palm Pre, though. It’s mostly a local search for now, with the exception of searching your mail servers for messages that aren’t on your device.

One of the biggest features of 3.0 – push notification – is still nowhere to be seen on my iPhone. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Beejive 3.0 which will allow me to receive IM’s in the background, but so far Agile Messenger is the only messenger with any Push.

Would love some different notification styles

As a last note, I just wanted to think out loud about the way the OS handles notifications: I think it’s actually a little too basic. Android and WebOS devices both have trays that hold notifications for later viewing, but the iPhone can ever only show one thing at a time. What’s more, there’s no way to hide a notification except for closing it. If you can’t deal with reading a long text message at the moment, you’ll actually mark it as read by closing the notification. That means that there’s nothing to remind you to read it again later. I think the iPhone will really need some notification innovation to truly take things to the next level. Apple’s platform has a great lead in terms of app selection and popularity, but the others are really getting it right when it comes to multi-tasking and managing lots of incoming information.

How about you, dear JAMM readers? Any thoughts/wishes on 3.0 so far?

How often have you gone to sync your Windows Mobile phone, and gotten a message, changes on your server mean all of your data will have to be re-synced? Your phone is re named on your PC and all of your Data is duplicated. Well I found a handy free application that might help you clean up your Outlook Database…

Let’s face it, syncing Windows Mobile, via activestink [not a typo] has always been a process fraught with uncertainty. This little utility from an independent developer over at XDA Devs, offers a solution to deleting duplicate entries in Outlook. I’m always really cautious when I try freeware like this, so make sure you do a backup before your try it. As the developers disclaimer recommends as well.

This is a really promising free application, that promises more in the future. The need for duplicate PIM database removal, has been a prominent need for a long time. Outlook Cleaner, is the first WinMo App I’ve seen that actually achieves this. In a way that seems completely logical, edit the database on the WinMo device, that is usually gobble-de-gook to most people, inaccessible.

Using Contact Cleaner, reduced my contacts from over 1200 to 360, obviously that’s a space saving in any one’s terms. As well as not having to scroll through all of those duplicates. The application is incredibly easy to use, and has plenty of in built cautions, so that you don’t delete things/data you don’t want to.

The one thing that’s a little bit unintuitive, is the process for merging similair contacts, it’s still a bit like editing an excel file. choosing functions in an action field, to tell the app what to do with the data.

Overall though, this is a really handy application, that does something that Windows Mobile cannot, therefore adding value to any WinMo Device. Anything that circumvents manual editing of your contacts to remove duplicates, has got to be a good thing.