iPhone News Updated

Stacks for iPhone Adds Spring-Loaded Launcher

Stacks is an add-on for jailbroken, or hacked, iPhones which brings a distinctly Mac-like tweak to the iPhone UI. As the video shows, Stacks lets you replace the icons in the home row (the non-moving row of icons at the bottom of the screen) with, well, stacks.

Touch one with your finger and it expands to show a bendy column of extra icons. Think of it as piling up app shortcuts and then fanning them out like a pack of cards to pick one. Stacks has been around for a little while, but the video shows the soon-to-be-released v3 which adds renaming and drag’n’drop editing.

As Erica Sadun over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, it’s a shame that you need a Jailbroken iPhone to run this neat and rather handy tweak. On the other hand, though, the OS 3.0 search feature all but renders this obsolete.

[Thanks: http://www.wired.com]

Skype Version 1.1 Out For The iPhone.

Few things go together better than Skype and smartphones. That’s why the Skype application for the iPhone has been so successful. It was released at the end of March and, as of this May, it’s been downloaded over 4 million times. That means that roughly one out of every ten of the 40 million iPhone users out there has Skype on their phone.

For a lot of people it’s much cheaper and easier to use Skype on their phone to place calls. Long distance calls especially are often cheaper with Skype credit than through a carrier. I’m not sure how happy AT&T is with Skype right now, but it’s existence has meant very good business for Apple.

Now the first ever Skype iPhone update is out. Version 1.1 includes a bunch of useful new features, like the ability to send SMS messages using Skype credit, voicemail support, and improved dialing. It also contains support for a whole bunch of languages, including Chinese.

You can find more details about the Skype update here. Sadly, push notifications have not yet made it to Skype. It’s taking some app developers a long time to get with the program on that one.

[Thanks: http://www.i4u.com/]