Yesterday, Orb Networks released OrbLive 2.0 ($9.99, App Store), an app designed to work with their own Orb streaming program for Windows.

The basic tenet behind OrbLive is that instead of being limited by the storage capacity of the iPhone, you should be able to use the networking capabilities of the device to stream anything from your own library at home. In addition to this, OrbLive also allows you to stream live TV to the iPhone.

However, there are a few catches, the first of which being that the Orb program is currently available only to Windows users (though Mac and Linux versions are on the way, apparently). Live TV watching requires an Orb compatible TV tuner in your PC, and video can only be watched with a WiFi connection and must be under 3GB.

If you do manage to get it all working, however, there are some nice features to Orb - such as the ability to stream video and audio in any format directly to the iPhone without any conversion.

There is also a free version of the streaming app, but it limits you to 3 randomly selected pieces of media of each media type.

If you're the sort of person who spends a lot of time in airports, or have any loved ones consistently up in the air, FlightTrack ($4.99, App Store) by Ben Kazez may be the App for you. FlightTrack allows you to view real-time flight tracking maps, featuring routes, positions, weather and more.

FlightTrack gets its data from FlightView, a source which the US government and some of the world's largest airlines use for keeping tabs on airspace.

Using this wealth of data, it's possible to keep track of multiple flights, using flight numbers for reference, allowing you to see in-depth details about a flight (speed and altitude, for instance).

Currently FlightTrack is only able to track flights within the U.S., including inbound and outbound international flights, but the developer hints at this changing in future updates, along with information on Baggage Claim and Departure Gates.

Today there are two notable entries in games section of the App store, with the first of them being Frenzic ($4.99, App Store), by the Iconfactory. Frenzic, originally released for OS X, is a game that supposedly "makes Tetris and Bejeweled look like child's play".

Frenzic

Frenzic is noted for its highly addictive gameplay, which has you filling up empty circles with coloured pie pieces, with fully filled pies giving extra lives and points - and failure to fill empty circles costing you precious lives.

The online component to the game allows you to add friends, track stats, and look at high scores (with the added bonus of being able to compare high scores to people in your area using Location Services).Frenzic also has all the visual polish that the Iconfactory usually lavishes on its Apps, giving the game a consistently professional feel.



Cube

The other big release today was Cube (Free, App Store), by fernLighting. Cube is a first person shooter that features single and multiplayer and "fast oldskool gameplay". Cube is an open source effort, built on an entirely new and apparently unconventional engine, which features "very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail". Right on.



According to the developer, the game has had no features removed for the iPhone, keeping features such as in-game editing, cooperative editing, and demo recording, though they mention that some of these features are entirely impractical on the iPhone.

Having tried it, we can say it's quite impressive technically - it looks very good for a 3D game on the iPhone and has an acceptable framerate. However, there are big problems with the interface and controls, which cannot be reconfigured, the tiny menus, and the slightly grating music that you cannot seem to turn off. The most frustrating part is that its clear to see that if the interface was redone, there would be a really good multiplayer FPS for the iPhone existing this very moment. That day is sure to come, but not just yet.

We recently wrote about the release of Chess with Friends (App Store, Free), a game which allows you to play Chess against anybody on your contact list, allowing you to make moves whenever it suits you.

When Chess with Friends was first released, it was only available in a handful of countries, due to Newtoy's servers only being able to handle contacts with 10-digit phonenumbers. As of this morning, however, Chess with Friends was added to all iTunes regions.

That's not all, though - Newtoy has also stated that they are changing the price of their Chess app from $4.99 to free, a move they say was motivated by seeing "the excitement that [their] '1000 free download' offer generated", preferring to "set the world on fire" before making a quick buck.

We've also had the chance to finally try out Chess with Friends myself, now that it's available to the world at large, and have been having a good time playing chess with the creators of Chess with Friends themselves. We were pleased to see that signing up was a fairly painless process, involving only putting in the details that you'd like to use to log in. One validation email later and we were good to go.

Inviting friends who don't yet have Chess for Friends creates a quick invite email for you, and now that the app itself is free we can't really imagine people are going to have much of an issue with downloading it and giving it a go. The option to go against a random opponent works well, and fortunately doesn't conceal the username of your opponent (you never know). There's also the Pass and Play move for those with more local friends, which works exactly how you'd expect it to.

The Games with Friends screen shows all of your Chess games, past and present, separated respectively by Your Move, Their Move, and Game Over. You can easily see what colour your pieces are from a quick glance, and you can also see when your opponent is actively looking at the game in play, signified by a pair of googley eyes.

Chess playing itself is simple, allowing you to move about pieces with a touch, and only making a move when you submit it, meaning you can't make a horrible mistake by mistouching. Captured pieces line the bottom of the board, and you can easily flick through past moves using a toggle at the bottom of the screen.

All in all, Chess for Friends is easily the most accessible and elegant form of Chess for the iPhone available, and it's now free. Yes please.

Night Camera ($0.99, App Store) by Sudobility solves a problem some users may have when taking photos at night with the iPhone's camera.

The iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera with an excellent image sensor that allow the handset to take good pictures when the lighting is good and the subjects are still. But when the lighting gets dim, the iPhone's simple, fixed lens camera can't do much to adjust to the lower light levels, resulting in blurry images.

The only way of getting around this is by developing a superhuman stillness of hand - which isn't really an ideal solution. Night Camera gets around this by using the iPhone's accelerometer to detect an optimal moment of stillness to take the photo, producing clear shots in poor lighting (see below).

The interface of Night Camera itself is straightforward and often nearly identical to the normal camera pane that is used throughout the iPhone. You hold the camera as still as you can, and the app will take the photo automatically when the time is right.

The only thing that could be done is to possibly clean up the interface even more, or have a nicer icon - but at its core it adds a very nice bit of functionality to the iPhone's camera.

Chess is already a good game, so just imagine how much fun Chess with Friends (App Store, $4.99) is going to be.

That seems to be the line of thinking from Newtoy, Inc. a new studio formed by two brothers who quit their jobs at Microsoft to work on the iPhone, a platform which they believe is going places. They've worked on games like Age of Empires, and more recently, Halo Wars - until they quit the job to start Newtoy.

Chess for Friends allows you to play chess with friends or random opponents using an asynchronous server - meaning that you don't have to stay online for the game to keep going, allowing you to make a move against your opponent whenever it suits you. Other Chess games require you to sit out chess games in one big go, so Chess with Friends has got a lot going for it.

It supports multiple games (otherwise it would be titled "Chess with Friend") and a "Pass and Play" mode to challenge a friend who is with you in person. If you have no friends, the app can also find you a random opponent.

Newtoy promises in-game chat and virtual grandmasters for 1.1, and asks that interested onlookers keep an eye out for future games on the "Games with Friends" network.

Yesterday saw the release of Defend! (App Store, $0.99) by John Kooistra, a game which supposedly "puts you in charge of protecting your world from an invasion force that wants nothing more than your utter destruction". Harsh.

Defend opts for old-school arcade simplicity, with the game itself consisting of shooting red circles coming towards your blue circle. With multiple levels there are also multiple kinds of enemies, requiring you to adjust your tilting strategy as time goes on.

The control scheme uses the accelerometer instead of the touch screen, meaning you have to tilt the iPhone to control the stream of bullets, rather than thumbing about the screen. Naturally the game has a high score board, which for now is local scores only.

The Greek-language iPhone Hellas blog is reporting that Apple plans to release the next software update for the iPhone, iPhone Software 2.2, next Friday, November 21st.

No further details are provided, though the website recites an expected feature list on par with previous expectations. Among those features are:

• Safari interface tweaks with relocated Google search


• New App Store app with new categories interface, and "report a problem" feature


• Auto-correction toggle and Japanese Emoji icons


• Google Street View, transit and walking directions


• Direct podcast downloads

One AppleInsider reader submits the following YouTube video showing a new behavior discovered in the Safari page navigation interface of the latest iPhone Software 2.2 beta.

At face value, it appears the behavior is more likely a bug than a feature.

For many people, stargazing is a hard hobby to follow unless you live in a remote location. The iPhone has had a few apps designed for people who want to stargaze, such as Starmap ($11.99, App Store), but as from today there is a new and cheaper alternative.

Space Walk, by Vito Technology ($4.99, App Store is an iPhone-bound companion for stargazers who need a helping hand.

Star Walk can detect your location using the built-in GPS of the iPhone 3G, recreating the same night-sky that you're standing beneath. You can then drag the sky around, with the familiar pinch-to-zoom functionality built into the app.

The sky interface itself is a mixed affair, with a beautiful, realistic starmap but an unfortunate neon green overlay, with various features labelled with Courier. It's not familiar, and the fact that Star Walk's menus are all well designed makes this odd design choice somewhat of an enigma.

When you zoom into a planet and choose to read some information about it, the presentation is nothing short of one of those Hollywood-style pieces of software where things bleep and zoom around and it's hard to decide whether it's charming or unnecessary.

Star Walk, with some visual polish could do very well. But if you're willing to spend a little more, you may want to try the alternatives.