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Last fall, Starbucks announced a “Song of the Day” promo giving away more than 50 million free songs via iTunes download card.  This event coincided with the Starbucks iPhone/iTunes “Now Playing” service. 

The “Song of the Day” promo ran for more than 30 days in more than 10,000 Starbucks locations.  According to data released by Starbucks today, the promo only saw 6 million songs downloaded- an 8% redemption rate.

I don’t know about you, but I know I had a few cards that I never redeemed- it will be interesting to see how well the next venture fares.

Yeah, yeah- the Pwnage tool has been released.  What does that mean for iPhone geeks who just want to add a few cool apps and don’t care much about changing carriers, sticking it to Apple, etc?

Well, it paves the way to use the coolest third party apps on the iPhone well into the future.  And that is a neato thingo.

Without this level of access, apps like Apollo, MobileScrobbler and Tap Tap Revoloution would not be possible.  These integrate with “off-limits” portions of the Apple software as laid out in the developer kit agreement.  Apollo runs in the background, MobileScrobbler runs in the background and taps into MobileMusicPlayer and Tap Tap Revoloution not only taps into MobileMusicPlayer, but can download its own music files from the net.

Ah, such interesting times.

After a conversation over lunch tomorrow about Guitar Hero on the iPhone, I had to laugh when I saw this mod for Tap Tap Revolution.

When can I plug the guitar in?

Finally got around to fixing the iPhone Installer.app “Main Script execution failed” problem.  I was running 1.1.4 and it turned out that the Installer.app somehow had acquired wrong security settings.

My fix:

1: SSH’d into the iPhone

2: Corrected permissions to 755 plus the setuid bit (allowing execution as root)

chmod 4755 /Applications/Installer.app/Installer

3: Corrected owner and group:

chown root:wheel /Applications/Installer.app/Installer

4: Restarted the iPhone and tapped Installer.app

5: Now, it’s working great!

iLounge has posted the a look at iTunes HD Radio tagging.  Very cool… too bad it’s so expensive.

http://ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-itunes-tagging/

This is the best & most complete unofficial, native iPhone app source listing:

http://appleiphoneschool.com/sources/

From the guys at Apple iPhone School.

Freeverse has posted a teaser for “Flick Sports” a series of games for the iPhone.  Apparently they just couldn’t wait until the big SDK reveal tomorrow and have some Wii-esque plans in mind-

Golf, Bowling, Soccer, and Baseball and Moto Racing are all in the lineup utilizing the iPhone’s multitouch flick and pinch gestures.

iPhone 1.1.3 is one finicky beast. I suggest the following apps for installation.. and in this order:

ZiPhone- for the jailbreak

BSD Subsystem- required for many 3rd party apps

openSSH- to get simple external access to the iPhone

BossTool- allows you to move Applications off of 300MB the root partition to your large partition, follow instructions and move all three categories

For some reason the utility for changing the password in iPhone 1.1.3 is broken. You cannot use passwd to change password or you will have to restore the system. I found a great workaround online which uses perl.

perl -e 'print crypt("PASSWORD", "XX")."\n"'

Simply replace "PASSWORD" and the two character hash "XX". Then, take the resulting hash and replace the "alpine" password hash in /etc/master.passwd for both "root" and "mobile".

To fix iPhone Installer.app 3.0 “Error package download failed” on firmware 1.1.3, make sure to install “Community Sources.”