A few days ago, I took 10 seconds to fire off a question to John Carmack of iD Software, who basically INVENTED modern gaming as we know it, over Twitter. This guy is solely responsible for gaming today. He created Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake (not to mention causing me to log hours and hours of gametime) and spawned countless games in their wake like Half-Life.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/

John Carmack, the legendary godfather of gaming answered my question from Twitter. I guess I ought to put Doom on my iPhone now, or at least die happy.

I’ve been using Twitter to connect with industry leaders, celebrities, and everyday people. If you’d like to know how you can utilize Twitter to build your business or online persona, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck or a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

iTwitter is a fast, flexible, rich featured twitter client for iPhone and iPod touch. It has a lot of cool features that you see in other Twitter apps, but rarely together.

UNIQUE FEATURES FROM iTwitter
- Badges to show number of unread tweets
- Landscape mode supported everywhere in iTwitter
- Landscape inline browser
- Address Book
- Landscape launch to compose
- Customizable user home screen(Big deal for business twitter account)
- Group feature
- Cached tweets for faster loading
- Inplace profile viewer

Other iTwitter FEATURES
- Handle multiple twitter accounts
- View your twitter timeline, replies, and direct messages
- Manage your favorite tweets
- Browse your following and followers
- Compose new tweets,
- Fast Retweet
- Reply directly to tweets and send direct messages
- Follow and un-follow people
- Inline TwitPic image viewer
- Upload pictures to TwitPic
- Unparalleled scrolling performance
- Twitlonger supported
- Uses secure connection (https)
- Custom searches
- Nearby searching
- Save your favorite searches
- landscape keyboard
- Conversational Threaded tweets

Poised to cause severe cases of ADD and OCD, iTwitter will Push updates to your phone as they happen. For Twitter addicts like me, it can be a blessing and a burden. It’s a fairly nice upgrade for users that are using TwitterFon, and the interface is a step up as well. The only catch is that to receive Push updates, those users must also be using iTwitter. I presume that they did that because it is new and they wanted to get it out there, and perhaps a later update will Push updates from anyone on any client.

I haven’t really found any client I like as much as I do TwitterFon, even popular ones like TweetDeck I just can’t get into (especially the Desktop version). This one seems pretty good so far, but the update timing is a little slow compared to the other products. With 3G connectivity a bane on the battery life, we gotta make the most of our activity time, and that can’t be sitting and waiting for updates. Hopefully they will improve on that in the future.

Check it out today iTwitter on AppStore

Here are some of my favorites so far, in no particular order:

BeeJive IM: Killer IM client that connects to all the popular IM services. Similar to Trillian without all the bloat. Uses IM threading just like the iPhone SMS app.

Urbanspoon: Tells you whats in the area to eat, reviews, and the price.

Radarscope: RadarScope is a specialized display utility for weather enthusiasts and that allows you to browse NOAA’s public NEXRAD Level 3 data feed.

Slacker Radio: Listen to over 100 expert programmed radio stations or create your own custom stations directly on the iPhone. Slacker Radio is the best way to discover new artists and hear your favorite songs.

FlightControl: Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were handed complete control over LA’s air space during your coffee break? Find out in this brilliant new casual game from Firemint! Air traffic control is the world’s most stressful job, but not for you. You don’t need heading angles, flight rules or meteorological reports, you’re a natural! A prodigy! A born controller! Just touch and drag the planes to their runway.

AOL Radio: AOL Radio powered by CBS Radio features over 200 stations that span more than 25 genres of music plus 150+ CBS RADIO stations from across the United States. For the first time, iPhone and iPod Touch users will be able to access hundreds of free music stations.

AOL SHOUTcast Radio: SHOUTcast Radio is one of the leading online directories of professionally and community programmed radio stations. There are over 25,000 stations from around the world and over 500,000 simultaneous listeners at any given time. SHOUTcast is known for its depth and breadth, with broadcasts ranging from globally recognized music to local music and talk stations.

TwitterFon: TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and is a superfast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch. TwitterFon is focused on ease of use and 80% of your daily Twitter tasks, such as see your friends/replies/messages timeline, see favorites, and send/reply a tweet. You can also search tweets, get twitter trends, upload photos to twitpic.com, and update your location information.

Alarm Clock: For someone who is dead to the world when they are sleeping, this was a no-brainer App to download. Quite handy, I can’t believe this isn’t on the iPhone by default.

The new 3.0 Firmware introduced a lot of new features that the community has been demanding since the iPhone first went on sale.

You can see most of the new features here:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

The one thing that stuck out to me as ‘missing’ when I was looking through the phone was the Tethering functionality. Tethering lets you use an external device such as a MacBook to use your phones data connection to access the internet. Previously, that page did not say AT&T was not supporting tethering, and you cannot find this option anywhere on the iPhone right now. Of course, with a jailbroken iPhone, you can access anything. That voids warranty though, so we don’t want to do that. But, there is a way to enable iPhone Tethering without jailbreaking the phone!

**Disclaimer: It is against AT&T TOS to use data tethering, so use at your own risk!**

On a Mac:

First, you need to have iTunes 8.2, an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, and 10.5.x Leopard Operating System for iPhone Tethering to work.

1. Download the AT&T carrier settings file (thanks Gizmodo)
2. Connect your iPhone to your Mac via dock or USB cable
3. Copy the following text: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
4. Open the Terminal app, and paste the text you just copied in Step 3
5. Sync your iPhone in iTunes, when it says Ok to Disconnect, hold the Option key and click Restore in iTunes
6. It will ask what file to restore. Select the ATT_US.ipcc file you downloaded in Step 1 and click Restore

Now you can go into your Settings on the iPhone and see that Internet Tethering is a new option!

If you are using Windows, the steps are slightly different. You can view the steps over at krillr.com.

Be careful! AT&T does not want people using iPhone Internet Tethering right now because they do not have a data plan for that, so if you go online don’t transfer a lot of data and garner attention.