Apple will open its 43rd retail store in its home state of California on Friday at Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto.

Dubbed the Apple Store Vintage Faire, the shop will open to the public on November 14, 2008 at 6:00 p.m. PST.

Customers seeking additional information can contact the store at 209.342.1500.

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.

Apple on Monday released iLife Support 8.3.1 [11.7MB], which provides system software components shared by all iLife ’08 applications. The update is recommended for all users for iLife ’08 running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, as it improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues.

The patch also addresses three similar security issues where viewing a maliciously crafted TIFF or large JPEG image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution on systems running Mac OS X Tiger.

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.

We cover a good deal of releases on the App Store here on the AppleInsider iPhone blog, and we try to capture a snapshot of the best apps passing through. This app, while its audience may be limited, is a sterling example of what an iPhone App should be.

The word 'Trein' may just seem like poor spelling, but it is actually the Dutch equivalent for Train. The Dutch rail system is supposedly the third most crowded in the world - so any way of getting through it faster is a gift from above.

Trein (App Store, $2.99), by Dennis Stevense is an App designed to help you navigate through the perils of the Dutch rail system, plan future train rides, and more -- scraping information from the clunky and frustrating NS.nl website and channelling it into a functional form.

I'm going to be succinct: if you have an iPhone, and you use the Dutch railway in any capacity, you should get this app. So why is this such a good app?

Trein has three main components: Departures, Disturbances and a Planner. Disturbances is the most simple part, showing a list of disturbances in the network which you can then see in further detail by jumping through a link to the NS website.



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No, that's not Colonel Sanders etched into the back of this first-generation iPhone, nor is it Orville Redenbacher. It's a rustic Steve Jobs!

"I wish I could hold onto this iPhone for the rest of my life, but between rent, tuition and books I absolutely need the money, bad," says owner Andrew, who put the one-of-a-kind device up for sale on eBay.

It's an unlocked and fully functional first-generation iPhone with a "few scratches" from every day use. Bidding appears to have opened at $100.

Many have commented on iPhone's inability to record and edit more than one audio track at a time, but now FourTrack ($9.99, App Store) by Sonoma Wire Works is set to remedy that.

Targeted at musicians of every sort, FourTrack lets you record its namesake four tracks, capturing each track one at a time. For instance, you could start with piano, introduce a bit of guitar, then some vocals, and finish it off with a recording of people applauding your latest effort. The Beatles recorded several albums with this method; it must be alright.

The app works with the inbuilt microphone, the iPhone headset or an iPod touch with a third-party microphone. There's Wi-Fi syncing with computers, too, for when you feel the iPhone by itself doesn't satisfy your needs as a music producer.

FourTrack is bristling with features, with time lines, shuttle wheels, latency compensation, a compressor-limiter, recording clip lights, and a lot more (the app store description contains all the explanations and features -- the list is too large for this article). The interface also has that top-tier finish, and it only goes to show that no effort has been spared in producing this app. At its introductory price of $9.99, FourTrack may prove just the trick for those more impromptu musical sessions.

Earlier this week, we reported that hard drive related issue appear to be delaying shipments of two Apple notebook configurations, namely the standard 1.6GHz MacBook Air and MacBook Pros custom ordered with a the $50 320GB Serial ATA @ 7200 option.

It was noted that the faster 320GB drive is currently delaying MacBook Pros by up to one week, while the Air's standard 120GB drive has led to a whopping three-week delay.

In an email Thursday, one reader noted that his MacBook Pro has been delayed nearly three weeks now and he was just informed by the Apple Store that a backorder on the 320GB 7200 HD drive is the root cause of the problem.

It can potentially be inferred from this that a nearly identical issue is holding up shipments of the 1.6GHz MacBook Air. In both cases, it appears Apple hopes to begin shipped all the notebooks in volume by the last week of November.