With Notch busy over at Minecon and the entire Minecraft world eagerly awaiting the game’s graceful departure from Beta, there was just one thing missing: Minecraft on your iPhone. Though it has long been known to be in the works, the game apparently launches tomorrow, November 17, or now if you’re in New Zealand.

See more pictures and read get more information on the game, after the break.

On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs unveiled the first generation iPod. It was a modest announcement held in an Apple conference room for a small clutch of reporters; downright spartan compared to the spectacle that would come to define future product launches. The short presentation ended with the unveiling of a white, handheld digital music player with large capacity and an intuitive design. The rest, as they say is history.

Here in 2011, it’s hard to imagine a world without the ubiquitous music player or the tablet and smartphone that followed in its wake. Back in 2001, MP3s were just on the cusp of becoming something big. Looking at the lackluster competition the rise of digital music, Apple saw an opportunity to move behind home computing — which at the time was the company’s soul focus — and move into consumer electronics. It was a gamble that paid off, and paved the way for the company’s restoration as a major player in the tech industry.

Read on after the break for a video of that fateful unveiling.

For a long while, iOS devices and Adobe Flash were like oil and water. Now, those days are over. Adobe has just revealed Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 which will allow you to access Flash content on your iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. While Apple has never been a fan of Flash, preferring to back competing HTML5 technology, Flash is now coming to their devices whether they want it to or not.

Flash Media Server will allow publishers to take their Flash content and create comparable HTTP content that can be viewed on iOS without any adjustment to the devices or the Safari browser. Instead of using the actual device to render the stream, Flash Media Server will do it instead, preventing Flash content from totally devouring your battery life. Flash Media Server is now available for purchase for by publishers for a cool $4,500. Get to it guys, I’ve got several years of back-catalog Flash content I need to consume on my iPod post-haste.

(via BGR)

9to5Mac reports that an announcement was made at a Las Vegas trade show that GameStop will begin carrying the full line of Apple’s iOS devices in stores. GameStop has also begun accepting iOS device trade-ins for in-store credit, because of course they would. They’re seemingly accepting trade-ins before they have actually obtained stock of new iOS devices to sell, which could suggest that — aside from oh, GameStop — GameStop may be waiting for the iPhone 5 before they begin stocking new iOS items.

If you are honest, gentle reader, you probably have a rough list of books that you’ve been meaning to read for a long time. The kind of classic you pick up in a bookshop, the kind that makes you mull over how it would change your life until you remember that the latest Twilight/Dan Brown crossover novel has come out and skitter off to buy that instead.

But thanks to so many books passing into the public domain and the pioneering work of organizations like Project Gutenberg, more foundational works are available for free than ever before. And what’s more, the widespread use of e-readers like the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle mean that you can now read and store these books with ease and comfort.

Unfortunately, good, free books for e-readers are often tough to come by. The top free book list on Apple’s iBooks can be hit-and-miss; finding free books using the Kindle’s navigation is a laborious process, and again frequently includes more self-promoting teaser tomes from marketing gurus than it does books that you really want to read. Even if you have a specific classic in mind, the first search results are often ‘critical editions’ of the books which, while providing context and generally not costing as much as new releases, aren’t free. You clicked this link because it had ‘free’ in the title, right?

For years, Apple enforced a very stringent policy that greatly limited the warranty of their devices if they were exposed to liquids. This was taken further with the inclusion of Liquid Submersion/Contact Indicators (LSI or LCI) — small tabs that changed color in the presence of moisture.

This has remained an Apple use gripe for some time. Especially when a nameless user might have accidentally spilled black current juice all over his PowerBook while under the influence of Tequila and Law and Order SVU, turning his computer into a messy, unrepairable junk pile. But according to Appleinsider, this policy may be changing.

I missed this awesome casemod when it made the online rounds a while back, but thanks to the magic of Tumblr, I’ve discovered Ryan Luke Johns‘ clever iBoy design. As diagrammed above, it’s got the hardware of an iPod wrapped up in a classic Game Boy case, with a dock connector cleverly inserted such that the Game Boy buttons correspond to iPod functions.

The iBoy is an iPod case with an internal dock connector—allowing the user to control the iPod with the buttons of an outdated Game Boy. Complete with a functioning speaker, hold switch, and headphone port, the iBoy is a user-friendly theft-deterrent.

The iPod has evolved and segmented quite a bit since Johns designed the iBoy in 2006, but this would still look pretty boss with an iPod Classic.

(iBoy via It’s all for you via EPICponyz | Artist’s page)

iOS 4.2, the long-awaited mobile operating system upgrade from Apple, has been the subject of crazy amounts of speculation this past month — Apple had merely announced that iOS 4.2 would be available for download sometime in November, but that didn’t stop iPad and iPhone users from breathlessly counting down and speculating as to why it had been delayed from dates that weren’t official.

The important thing is, iOS 4.2 is here, although Twitter users report that it’s not quite yet ready to download from iTunes. Apple has, however, put up a new iOS page heralding the features of 4.2, as well as a press release, reproduced below.

The big new features: Multitasking for the iPad (finally!), AirPlay, which allows Apple TV owners to wirelessly stream music and videos from their portable iDevices, and AirPrint, the driver-free wireless printing feature. Apple has also made Find My iPhone, which used to require a MobileMe subscription (and which works for the iPod Touch and iPad as well), free to all.

Hate to go with two ‘someone just released a beta of something’ type posts in a row, but it’s that kind of day! Apple has released the first developer’s build of the much-anticipated iOS 4.2 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch through its Dev Center. Yes, that means multitasking for the iPad, although only iOS developers will be able to download it from thence. Apple has also put out a press release formally announcing AirPrint, the wireless printing architecture that Apple showed off at its fall event.

For non-developers, iOS 4.2 will be available to the rest of us as a free download in November.

By their powers combined …

(via TDW | by Renier Martinez; minor note below.)