AT&T FREE Msg: Good News, your messaging package now includes text, picture & instant messages all for the same price of $19.99 per month. No action required

This strongly implies that I will be able to send picture and instant messages, which I can not do currently. Is this the precursor to the first significant software update for the iPhone? iPhone’s lack of IM and picture messaging are two of the most frequent complaints to Apple and AT&T.

UPDATE: A reader emails

Are you on pay-as-you-go (GoPhone) or contract? Over at this thread on Macrumors.com, somebody got the same message this morning. We were all ramped up the firmware update would be this afternoon. But most of us didn’t get the SMS. The original poster called in and ATT told him that it was a global change for GoPhone customers with data plans, didn’t apply to iPhone customers and was sent to some of them in error.

I am a GoPhone customer, but I also have the $19.99 text messaging plan, maybe you need both of those to get this message?

This could be a generic message, or it could be something more! Ahh rumors!

For the uninitiated, Campfire is an online chat service hosted by 37signals that allows you to chat and send files while saving everything online. You don’t have to worry about missing anything when you are away from your desk because when you sign back into Campfire, everything that has been said in the past is there waiting for you. It’s great if you work with a bunch of people in all different places and time zones.

One gripe I had with Campfire was that I had to have Safari running at all times when I wanted to be logged in. Safari is a bit of a resource hog when you open and close lots of tabs and leave it running for a while (at least the 3.0 Beta is) and I wanted to remain logged into our Campfire session most of the time.

I was talking (read:whining) to a friend about this issue and he suggested that I try Pyro, a simple app from Marko Karppinen & Co. that uses WebKit (the engine that Safari uses) to give you a dedicated Campfire viewer. No longer do I have to keep a copy of Safari running all the time to stay logged into Campfire! Hurrah!

Firing up Pyro is just like logging into Campfire. It asks for the Campfire account that you want to log in to and then for your username and password. Once you’re logged in, the familiar Campfire interface appears with a few little extras. Pyro gives you keyboard shortcuts to switch from room to room within Campfire and also to adjust text sizes. All the Campfire features work perfectly including file uploading, transcript reading and searching. The developer does warn you of issues with Safari 3.0 but I haven’t noticed any issues.

Pyro is a free download from Marko Karppinen & Co.

If you haven’t tried Campfire and you frequently do collaboration, I suggest you give it a shot, and also look at all the other 37signals applications!

I have mine set to display my current temperature and a small icon with current conditions in the menubar and when I click on it, a drop-down menu gives me more info about current conditions (windspeed/direction, humidity, dewpoint, barometric pressure) and a 3-day forecast. As an added bonus, when selecting a city name in the drop-down menu, you will be whisked to the Weather.com page for your city. Very useful. You can have multiple cities shown in the menu or cycled with city-name in the menubar.

Meteo isn't a resource hog, using 0% CPU and 29MB of real memory (I remember when the entire OS ran in a tenth of that) on my MacBook Pro. Meteo is free and open source and available on SourceForge.

In some tower defense games, the creeps follow a predetermined path and you must build your towers to attack them along those paths. In Desktop Tower Defense, you build a maze with your towers and the creeps travel through it and are attacked during their travels. With each increasing level, the creeps become stronger and more difficult. It may start out easy, but it sure doesn’t stay that way. Also, the game has a leaderboard and displays the best mazes that other players have built.

Surprisingly addictive, the single player version of Desktop Tower Defense has received a lot of notice from big name writers like Michael Arrington and Jeremy Zawodny, and now from MacApper!

However, single player wasn’t enough and the guys at the newly formed Casual Collective has built a multi-player version of Desktop Tower Defense. It’s mostly the same game as the single player version, with a few small changes. There are a number of ‘super-powers’ that you can attack your fellow players with and instead of the next level of creeps appearing after a set interval, the next level appears when the first player in your game finishes that particular level, so it’s to your advantage, at least for a while, to kill creeps quickly. At later stages of the game, you may not have your maze ready to kill the more advanced creeps.

On the right hand side of the screen, you can see the status of the other players in the game, how many lives they have left, how much gold they have and how many creeps are on their screen. In addition, clicking on their names will show you what their current maze looks like! Useful for using super powers, which are discussed later.

Fun for up to 12 players, it’s highly addictive, and when it’s out of beta (which should be soon), I know you’ll all enjoy it as much as I do! Sign up for a username at the Casual Collective website and be notified as soon as the game comes out of beta.

Desktop Tower Defense has a number of different types of towers, and various ones are available depending on whether you are playing easy, normal or hard modes:

Pellet Tower – This tower is a slow tower that fires bullets. It can be upgraded into a long-range Sniper Tower. Attacks air and ground.

Squirt Tower – A sort of upgraded Pellet Tower. It fires more quickly but is less powerful. It can be upgraded into a high-speed Typhoon Tower that is the mainstay of my offense. Attacks air and ground.

Dart Tower – I didn’t use the Dart Tower much in the beginning, but I’ve started to enjoy it more and more. The Dart Tower shoots a missile at enemy targets. When it hits, it damages it’s target and whatever enemies are in the immediate vicinity. If you design your maze appropriately, you can get your creeps to bunch up together and the Dart Tower can be come very effective. It upgrades into a ICBM Tower that has a long range and strong attack. It attacks ground only.

Swarm Tower – This tower is for attacking the flying creeps that show up every 8 levels or so. They shoot four missiles at once very quickly and are devastating against the flying creeps. Usually after the second flying creep level, you NEED to build these to survive them. They can be upgraded into ridiculously powerful Storm Towers. Air attacks only.

Frost Tower – Frost Towers don’t do a lot of damage, but they do slow down creeps. If you’ve got a number of towers near each other, you want to keep your creeps in the kill zone. Frost towers help with that considerably. They can be upgraded into Blizzard Towers. These attack air and ground units.

Bash Tower – Bash Towers attack units in their immediate area. They only fire every few seconds, but placed properly they can do tremendous damage and take out many units at once. They are expensive, but can be upgraded into a Quake tower that will take out most everything in their path. Bash Towers attack ground units only.

Ink Towers – These are peculiar towers that took me a while to understand how to utilize them effectively. It has a kill zone set in a ring around it that it launches blobs of “ink” into. You must design your maze carefully to take advantage of it’s abilities, but when done correctly, the ink blobs can quickly neutralize creeps. It can be upgraded into an Ink-Blot Tower. Ground attack only.

Snap Tower – Snap Towers are single shot remote controlled bombs. You can place them around the map and when triggered they will do devastating damage to creeps in the area. They upgrade to Spike Towers. Attacks air and ground units.

Boost Tower – Boost Towers increase the damage of other towers immediately around them. Used carefully, they can tip the balance of power in your game.

Adding to the variety, Desktop Tower Defense has a number of types of creeps:

Normal – Your standard dot of death moving across the screen. Nothing special here.

Immune – These creeps can’t be slowed by Frost Towers.

Group – Group Creeps are stacked on top of each other and are released simultaneously rather than more spread out. If they get by your towers it can be difficult to kill them.

Fast – As the name suggests, Fast Creeps move much more quickly across your maze than the others.

Spawn – Spawn Creeps split into smaller creeps when shot. At later levels, they can split several times, making for some pain-in-the-neck creep action.

Flying – These creeps fly straight over your maze giving you limited time to kill them.

Also, every so many levels, you have a ‘boss’ creep that is super-strong and difficult to kill.

New in the multiplayer version are Super-Powers! These can really shift the balance of power in the game if you use them carefully! You are awarded one point for each level that passes, and you spend can spend them on various powers.

Light – This power blacks out one of your opponents for 5 seconds and prevents them from building or seeing what’s going on.

Gold-Lock – This power prevents one of your opponents from buying or upgrading their towers for 10 seconds.

Silence – You can pick one type of tower that your opponent is using and silence it for a few seconds. Can make the difference if they are using one particular type of tower.

Defense – Prevents your opponents from using any attacks on you for 10 seconds.

Nuke – Kills everything on your screen! Great for when you’re getting overwhelmed… if you’ve saved up enough points.

You can play the single player version NOW and register your username so that you’re ready to play the multiplayer version when it’s released. Also, look for an interview with Paul and Dave, the creators of Desktop Tower Defense soon!

I want to see them blend a blender in their blender.

(via Daring Fireball)

My first smartphone was the T-Mobile supported Danger Inc. Sidekick. I have described the Sidekick as a Blackberry for consumers, rather than business-types. It is extremely easy to use, has built-in push email, instant messaging via AIM, text messaging, (pretty crappy) web browsing, and a limited but not terrible supply of applications.

The Sidekick is a nice parallel to the iPhone because both devices are very good at what they do, albeit with a few flaws, and both are truly revolutionary.

One of my favorite ‘features’ of the Sidekick was that ALL data went through Danger’s servers before going out to the actual internet. A number of users complained about the privacy aspects of this, though it never concerned me, and if it bothers you that much than it was not the product for you. The HUGE advantage to this was in instant messaging.

As has been pointed out numerous other places on the web, the iPhone’s EDGE data stream is dropped when a phone call is made or received. This is a problem with regards to IM because your instant messaging client must be in constant communication with the host servers or you are promptly kicked offline, ending all conversations you are currently involved in. I had this problem with my Windows Mobile phone and it drove me berzerk after using the Sidekick for a year.

The main advantage of running your IM through Danger’s servers is this: it maintains your connection to your IM provider while making calls. This means that if you are having an IM conversation with two friends and a call comes through, you can’t write anything to your buds, but anything they write while you are on the phone comes through once you hang up. You can start your conversation back up again immediately without going through a sign-on process again.

To contrast, on the Windows Mobile device, when a call came through and your data stream was dropped, you would get kicked offline and any messages your friends sent to you while you are on the call would be kicked back to them with a “So-and-so is not online” warning. This is very, very annoying when trying to have a conversation. I can hardly put into words how elegant the IM solution on the Sidekick was. I pray that Apple will come up with a similar solution to this datastream loss problem with regards to IM before they launch iChat on the iPhone.

The Sidekick also has an especially interesting strategy regarding their Software Development Kit. Developers may download a Sidekick SDK from Danger, but in order to get their finished program into the hands of consumers, they must go through Danger’s Sidekick application download service. That is, no applications are downloadable to the Sidekick unless Danger tests and approves the program for the device. I have a feeling that Apple may (should?) follow this same route with iPhone apps in order to maintain stability and security on the device.

Anyone who has downloaded apps onto a Windows Mobile device can tell you what a problem third-party applications can be. I had a Starcom XV6700 from Verizon Wireless that crashed several times a day until I wiped it clean of all the fancy applications I downloaded onto it. Stability and security are, and should be, very real concerns of Apple’s with regards to third-party programs on the iPhone.

Portable IM was the killer app of the Sidekick and would do wonders for the iPhone if it’s implemented properly. The UI of the text messaging application on the iPhone is perfect for IM, now all that Apple needs to do is make sure that your conversations don’t get lost when you get a call and all the iPhone haters will have one less thing to complain about. If Apple takes a page or two out of the Danger playbook, I will be one very happy consumer.

Today is Independence Day here in the United States and we celebrate our independence from the hated British by shooting off fireworks, eating as many hot dogs as we can in 12 minutes and preparing for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

To show your patriotism on your Mac, download this great fireworks screensaver and enjoy the fancy 3D graphics that have come a lonnnnng way since ye olde Pyro!

(hat tip to TUAW)

Normally $29.95, macZOT! has it for a bargain price of $19.95!

If you do much FTPing or use the amazingly cheap and useful Amazon S3 (Forklift is BY FAR the best S3 browser I’ve found) , I cannot recommend Forklift more highly, plus the guys at BinaryNights are just great.

Go grab it now!

EarthDesk is part Geochron, part weather map. A map of the Earth is displayed on your desktop overlaid with a composite satellite image showing up-to-date cloud cover and a shadow depicting daylight, moonlight and night on the map.

It makes for a beautiful and informative desktop background, and encourages me to keep my desktop clean so I can see the entire map!

There are numerous options including settings for how often to update the map, whether to show moonlight or night, where to center the map, numerous different map projections, and an option between a Living Earth map and a political map. EarthDesk 4.0 is a system preference panel so you don’t have to worry about extra icons in the dock, but there is an optional menu control.

If you’re always looking for that perfect desktop image, EarthDesk may be for you. I bought it several months ago and haven’t been tempted to change my desktop image once. EarthDesk is $19.95 from Xeric Design, and a free trial is available.

“Hi, Jordan.”

Phew, I’m glad I got that off my chest. It wouldn’t be a problem that I snore, except I snore so loudly that I keep my girlfriend up at night, that is, I used to until we discovered Noise.

Noise is another one of those tiny applications that does one thing very well. It generates two different ‘colors’ of noise. Thanks to the miracle that is Wikipedia, I can tell you that White Noise is “noise signal in the spatial domain which has an autocorrelation which can be represented by a delta function over the relevant space dimensions.” Noise will also generate Pink Noise if you’re feeling colorful. Got all that? When you run Noise, you have a very simple window with a volume bar, and an on/off button. This should be self explanatory.

When Noise is turned on, it generates what can best be described as static. It might jar you for a moment (my dog runs when I turn it on) but after about 30 seconds you hardly notice it’s there. When you run a white noise generator, it raises the noise floor of the room, causing any other sound to seem softer to your ears because your brain adjusts your hearing to compensate for the background noise. This helps some people sleep, some people concentrate, and some people relax. It’s the same idea as noise cancelling headphones.

We set Noise up as we’re going to bed, and we both sleep great. Download your own copy and start sleeping better tonight!