Last fall, Stanford University's School of Engineering began teaching a class on developing applications for the iPhone. This quarter, you don't have to empty your savings account to attend the class, as Stanford is now offering free video downloads of the class, "iPhone Application Programming," to the public on its iTunes U Web site. The class began this week, and will run for 10 weeks (users can also download slides and other course materials from the Web site for the course, CS 193P).

The class is being taught by several Apple employees including Evan Doll, a Stanford Computer Science alum who has worked on the iPhone team since version 1.0 was released. And Alan Cannistraro and Paul Marcos have more than twenty years of Apple experience between them and now work on a variety of iPhone applications. Marcos formerly taught other programming courses in the Computer Science department at Stanford.

Judging by the success of the fall quarter, the class is likely to be quite popular. According to Troy Brant, a second year computer science masters candidate who was the teaching assistant for the fall course and now for the current one as well, there are only 60 spots available and more than 150 people have applied (Stanford doesn't determine the final enrollee list for classes until several weeks into a course). In an interview, Brant described the relationship between Stanford and Apple as symbiotic and said the class is “a great introduction for people who haven’t had much mobile programming experience,” and presents an opportunity to learn convention, design patterns, and “good design.”

Brent Izutsu, Stanford’s project manager for Stanford on iTunes U, explained to the Stanford News Service that “working with Apple allowed us to focus our energy on identifying and capturing great content while Apple provided us the technology to distribute it globally.” Students enrolled in the class are required to use an Intel-based Mac for programming, but don't need to own an iPhone or iPod touch—they can borrow one for the course. Students taking the class online will receive the same instruction as those in the classroom, but not receive course credit.

Apple reports more 800 million downloads on the App Store so far, making the iPhone a great testing ground for creative entrepreneurs and budding third-party developers. In fact, some of the student-developed applications from the fall-quarter iPhone development class are already available for download on the App Store.

The iStanford application, developed in part by Kayvon Beykpou, was written with cooperation from the university and not only provides a campus map, directory, and building information, but also the sense that the university is on board with the iPhone’s ability to help students.

The potential for the device is vast and universities are beginning to recognize the education value for students. MIT and the University of Missouri are also offering classes on the subject and Abilene Christian University recently hosted a summit with more than four hundred participants on how to deploy the iPhone and iPod touch in the classroom.

Like any sports fan, race enthusiasts want the latest updates about their favorite pastime, and they want them now. Auto Racing Live gives you that information, but little else.

The NASCAR-focused app from iApp Ventures is not much more than a news reader that pulls racing news from three sources: ESPN, FOX, and Yahoo. You can toggle between each of these feeds, but you can’t add additional sources. After launching the app, you can read the headlines, or open the full article in the built-in browser. You can also choose to bookmark the link, which can later be opened in Safari.

Auto Racing Live’s App Store page claims a “true offline browsing experience,” but that wasn’t my experience with the app at all. Yes, when you have no cellular or Wi-Fi connection available, you can read the news summaries you’ve downloaded during your most recent connection. But if you try to tap Read More, Auto Racing Live prompts you to connect to the Internet before more content can be loaded. That’s not exactly offline browsing.

Don’t expect live race updates, either. Auto Racing Live is a headline service—nothing more—and not a very customizable one at that. NASCAR fans who want the latest news but don’t want to click around the Web via Mobile Safari may appreciate the collection of headlines this app provides, even at its $5 asking price. Personally, this app had me waving the caution flag.

Auto Racing Live is compatible with any iPhone or second-generation iPod touch running the iPhone 2.x software update.

[Beau Colburn lives in Boston and is probably watching the race on Sunday.]

Since its release on Tuesday, Skype for iPhone has been downloaded more than a million times—that’s a rate of six downloads a second, according to the company. All this despite the fact the software only works via the iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection, and not AT&T’s 3G network.

That restriction has angered some, who have argued that the practice is anti-competitive. Those allegations have been turned up a notch now, as the Wall Street Journal reports that an Internet advocacy group called Free Press has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether or not the restriction is in violation of federal law.

Free Press bills itself as a nonpartisan organization concerned with media reform. In its open letter to the FCC (PDF link), it asks the government body to confirm that mobile wireless Internet access is subject to the same rules as traditional broadband Internet.

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Accessibility is a problem for the iPhone. With the device's lack of physical controls, it’s virtually impossible for somebody who is vision-impaired to use the phone. Other touchscreen smart phones suffer from the same problem, so a few smartypants engineers at Google have come up with a clever way of dealing with the problem.

The system works by mimicking the traditional phone keypad, with the number five in the center and the other numbers arrayed around it. But since the screen has no physical keys, the software pops up the keypad wherever the user touches it. Wherever the finger makes contact becomes a five; slide the finger upwards and release, and it’s a two; slide it downwards, it’s an eight, etc. The user can enter a whole phone number by tapping, sliding, and releasing, all without having to look at the screen, since wherever the user taps becomes the keypad.

It’s a perfect embodiment of that old adage about turning a weakness into a strength: the downside of a touchscreen device is the lack of physical controls—but that also means you can put the controls wherever you want. It’s a simple yet brilliant solution to dealing with accessibility on the touchscreen smartphones.

Of course, given that Google has developed this system, it’s uncertain whether or not Apple could take advantage of it for the iPhone. But the idea of making the user control the interface based on where they make contact with the touchscreen could still be a powerful idea. Imagine a visually-impaired user not having to try and figure out where the iPhone’s “Slide to unlock” bar is. Instead, they simply place their finger on the touchscreen, swipe it across, and the phone is unlocked.

Google’s spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a touchscreen interface work for vision-impaired users; the company has launched a whole Eyes-Free Shell project devoted to exploring this and other ideas, like talking dialers and voice-synthesized directions. And since the Android OS is open source, all the code is available online.

It seems likely that Apple is working on its own accessibility solutions, though it’s impossible to know since it’s enshrouded in the Cupertino cone of silence. But hopefully the Apple engineers have come up with some similarly smart ideas for dealing with the challenges so many people face day-in, day-out.

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We in the U.S. love to complain. Take this week’s introduction of Skype for the iPhone. The mobile VoIP client appears to be a pretty solid offering, letting you not only chat with your Skype buddies, but also make voice calls—as long as you’re using the Wi-Fi connection, a stipulation Apple had pointed out way back in March 2008 when it first unveiled the iPhone SDK.

That didn’t stop the barrage of complaints that the ban on 3G was arbitrary and designed only to support AT&T’s business model. Which, to be fair, is pretty accurate. Whether or not that makes it wrong, well, that’s up to higher powers to decide. But at least we’re better off than the folks in Germany, where the country’s official provider, T-Mobile, wants to ban use of the Skype app on both its 3G network and its extensive Wi-Fi hot spot network.

Not only has T-Mobile said that the use of Skype is forbidden, but it’s also declared its intent to cancel the contracts of any users who use workarounds to run the program anyway. The company’s reasoning is that the program’s high data use would choke the network infrastructure and that it violates the customer contract, prohibiting VoIP—a clause apparently used by all other German mobile service providers as well.

Skype’s general counsel fired back in a blog post, saying: “They pretend that their action has to do with technical concerns: this is baseless. Skype works perfectly well on iPhone, as hundreds of thousands of people globally can already readily attest.”

Whatever the case, T-Mobile looks to have a steep road ahead of itself, as Skype is currently the top free app on the German App Store. Viel Glück!

Let’s be honest—ProCamera is not the perfect solution for every issue you may encounter when taking pictures with your iPhone. And it doesn’t do a lot of neat photo trickery to make your pictures look better. All daemgen.net’s app tries to do is keep your photos focused and sharp.

ProCamera uses the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to judge when the phone is being held steady, and waits for that moment to shoot the picture—certainly an innovative use of the technology. There are different settings to adjust the sensitivity of the accelerometer and when it takes the shot, but why bother? Assuming you always want the sharpest picture possible, the highest setting works just fine.

A self-timer is part of the package, with a good and loud beeping countdown, perfect for taking the occasional self-portrait. The app also shows you a tilt-meter, a circular image that lets you know if your picture is on the straight and level. This is also a good indication of when you are holding the phone perfectly still, so you can get the app to take the darn picture, already. If you don’t have a very steady hand to begin with, it can take a while before the app decides you are ready and steady enough to actually shoot. Blurry or not, this leads to some missed opportunities. Adjusting the accelerometer sensitivity helps speed things up a little, but that would seem to defeat the point of having an app whose purpose is producing the steadiest shot possible.

If keeping your phone straight and getting constantly blurry images are big problems for you, ProCamera may offer a solution to your camera troubles. If you are looking for more control over your images in addition to that nifty self-timer, you may want to look elsewhere.

ProCamera is compatible with any iPhone running the iPhone 2.1 software update.

[Jeff Phillips is an educator, podcaster, father, blogger, husband, photographer and general technology pundit. He has also been known to give the occasional Feng Shui consultation.]

Remember Battlezone? It was one of the first real 3-D video games that Atari released to arcades in 1980. You drove around on a vector grid in a transparent 3-D tank, blasting other transparent 3-D tanks, jeeps and the occasional UFO into small geometric pieces, while avoiding geometric obstacles. Battlezone was all about the vectors. And, believe me, it was pretty revolutionary in its day.

Truth is, I don’t remember Battlezone well, but I do remember its progeny. I got my tank-killing kicks in college playing Spectre VR on my Mac SE. I had a knack for blowing away my enemies while speeding away from their deadly fire in reverse.

Vector Tanks by Peter Hirschberg and Chillingo is essentially Battlezone for the iPhone and iPod touch. The first-person, 3-D tank shooter looks and sounds like the Atari classic but functions like an iPhone game. If anyone still doubts the iPhone’s future as a gaming platform, Vector Tanks offers a healthy dose of retro reality.

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The following article is reprinted from the Today@PC World blog at PCWorld.com.

From the category “the sky is blue and the sun is hot,” analyst Daniel Amir from Lazard Capital Markets decided to sell fairy cakes and tell us that Apple will introduce a 32GB version of the iPhone and will also release a low-end Wi-Fi-less model for the emerging markets.

Besides the fact that it’s obvious enough that Apple will increase the capacity of the iPhone, Amir also says that the new iPhone will be launched this summer—and isn’t this the usual time Apple announces new models? Of course it is!

The iPod touch already comes in a 32GB version, so it’s quite natural that this will transcend to the iPhone as well once the new model is announced (in June, as usual). Citing checks from “channel partners” Amir also says that Apple could release a lower-end version of the iPhone, without Wi-Fi, which will be targeted at emerging markets such as Brazil, Russian, India and China while a higher-end version, with a better camera and more storage capacity will hit North America and Europe.

It’s quite natural that the next improvements on the iPhone will be a better camera (most probably with video capabilities) and more storage—as after the software improvements the 3.0 update will bring, these are the most requested hardware features for the device. But what’s really strange is that Amir’s research states that a stripped down version of the iPhone will be made available to emerging economies.

It has to be noted to Apple is not like Nokia, who releases different versions of a phone for different countries (remember the North American E62 without Wi-Fi?) and that the Cupertino company has never released stripped-down version of its products for different countries. My guess would be that it wouldn’t start doing it now either, especially if it would be to remove Wi-Fi, a feature present from the first incarnation of the iPhone. It would be plain silly to release a third model of iPhone without Wi-Fi, after having this on board of the previous models for years now.

Again, the likelihood of Apple dropping Wi-Fi from an (unlikely to happen) stripped-down iPhone is even lower when one considers how many of the phone’s apps and features depend on this, from Front Row and AppleTV remote apps to iTunes DJ and various syncing apps. My verdict—it ain’t going to happen. Wi-Fi will be in, no matter what.

Amir also predicts that iPhone shipments could reach up to 5 million units in the second quarter of this year. The actual likelihood of this to happen is also very low, with a new iPhone expected in June and many consumers delaying their purchase in anticipation of the new model.

And last, but not least, Amir’s research quotes “channel checks” and “channels partners”, who are all apparently very knowing about Apple plans and intentions. When was the last time an analyst got something right about Apple’s plans? From tablets, to netbooks and mini iPhones, they’ve got it wrong. I doubt that they will be right this time round…

Truth is, there is precious little of value in most network newscasts these days. TV news is mostly a string of easily digestible three-minute or four-minute bits that nibble around the edges of substance. The short video stories on ABC News, which are one of the central attractions of the free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, are no different.

The ABC News app replicates much (but not all) of the content network’s Web site. You can view select segments from the network’s various news programs, including Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America and the Nightly News. Incredibly, I discovered that a few of the videos don’t actually play.

The app uses the phone’s geolocator function to offer news and weather from your local ABC affiliate. Of course, you can get a weather forecast just about anywhere—the ABC News app has the neat addition of radar images.

Alas, the app is missing the one section that makes the ABC News Web site worth visiting: The blogs. Rick Klein’s “The Note,” “The Radar” and especially Jake Tapper’s “Political Punch” are what keep me coming back to ABC News’s site. Without the blogs, the app feels truncated somehow. I hope ABC adds a blog section in a future update.

ABC News compatible with any iPhone or iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.x software update.

[Ben Boychuk is a freelance writer and columnist in Rialto, Calif. Feel free to e-mail him.]

Despite the fact that iPhone OS 3.0 is still a ways from seeing the public light of day, those who are concerned over whether or not they’ll be able to jailbreak Apple’s newest iteration can take heart. A post on the QuickPWN blog says that a Russian hacker has released an “unofficial” jailbreak for the beta software (that is, one not developed by the iPhone Dev Team that maintains the QuickPWN jailbreaking software).

Of course, the iPhone 3.0 software—which is currently in its second beta release—is only available to programmers who are paid members of Apple’s iPhone Developer Program. In related news, Ars Technica reported on Wednesday that the latest version of Apple’s SDK agreement, which developers are required to agree to when they download the iPhone beta OS, appears to prohibit developers from contributing to the jailbreak effort or distributing their applications via any channel other than the App Store.

Not that this is likely to put a stop to jaibreaking, as is clearly evident from the 3.0 jailbreak. But I imagine that Apple felt it had to give itself some recourse that could be used in a legal situation if necessary, such as the issue that has arisen over the DMCA exemption proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It remains to be seen to what extent Apple will actually try to enforce these new clauses, futile though such efforts would will likely be.