One of the top Celebrity news and gossip sites can now be found on the iPhone!

The free PopEater iPhone App serves up the top celebrity and entertainment headlines alongside the day's best celebrity photos. See breaking stories as they develop or dive straight into top items on the hottest topics, from celebrity babies and star romance to troublemakers and fashion. Which couples are on the rocks? What viral video is causing a stir? Who is revealing personal secrets on Twitter? What photo is the talk of the entire Web? It's all here, updated throughout the day, every day delivered straight to your iPhone or iPod touch.


KEY FEATURES:

• Flip through high-quality, full screen photos of celebrities -- on the set, in their latest magazine spreads, hitting the town, laughing with their kids -- with a flick of your finger
• Autosave feature allows you to view top entertainment news and photos even when you're offline
• What are the must-see clips of the day? Dive straight into the hottest celebrity and entertainment videos on YouTube directly from the stories about them. Done watching? Click back to the story with one touch.
• Read PopEater's exclusive star interviews
• Get Q&As and inside looks at in-depth interviews and cover stories from our top celebrity magazine and Web partners
• See music video and movie trailer premieres
• Video commentary including the Girls on Pop video podcast
• Be the first to spread the big story to your friends! Send breaking celebrity news directly to Twitter, Facebook and email.

AIM 4.0.2 and AIM (Free Edition) 4.0.2 are both now available in the iPhone App Store. As soon after we shipped AIM 4.0.1, we reviewed customer reviews on the iTunes and went to work on performance issues reported by some of our users.


Use App Store software update and you'll get the newest AIM for iPhone release. Please leave feedback below to let us know how it's working for you. We've gotten some reports of application stability and we're researching those issues as I type!

Thanks!
Lee Givens
AOL iPhone Product Lead

It's Friday, and you know what that means: Time to get out of the office and go have some fun. But how do you find out where your friends are, and what's going on in your city? Why, with your iPhone of course!

Going.com lets you find cool things to do in your city, and they've got a newly updated iPhone app out. In addition to telling you about events to check out, people to see, and places to be seen right in your own city, you can share where you are with your friends by updating your status on Facebook and Twitter, right from the app. Once you're there, you can let your friends know what you think about the event with ratings, comments, and photos.

Browse popular events around town, share them with friends, get on the RSVP list, see who else is going and get all the info on where it's going down. Sign up at going.com (or log in using Facebook Connect), get the Going App, and get Going!

Of course, if you'd rather just spend a quiet evening over a dinner and a movie with a loved one, there's an app for that, too. Grab the Moviefone app to find out what's playing, view trailers, and get showtimes and directions to theaters nearby.

Either way, use your iPhone to check out what's going on near you, and have a great weekend!

Today is the Running Man's birthday.

If you're an iPhone user (and I don't know why you're reading this blog if you're not), then you'll easily recognize the familiar form of the Running Man popping out from your home screen on a field of red or purple. AOL's Running Man has been an icon - both literally and figuratively - in the online world since he was conceived, and now he's a core champion of our mission to inform, entertain, and connect the world.

He's been around the world; he's been on TV, he's even been a super hero, and it was 13 years ago today that he first arrived on the scene. So here's to you, Running Man. Happy birthday, and thanks for pointing the way to a better, more connected Internet.

The Running Man doesn't need gifts, but he could use your vote. He's been nominated (for a third year) for the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame. It's the highest honor an icon can get. The Advertising Week poll runs until Sept. 18, and he's up against some strong competition. Won't you help him out by clicking over to http://runningman.aol.com to follow his campaign and to vote? You could even win an Acer Aspire One or two tickets to an exclusive AOL Music Event!

Anyone living in Northern Virginia, this Saturday, we'll be getting yet another Apple Store. Tyson's Corner, the home of the first Apple Store (opened May 15, 2001), is just a few miles down the Dulles Tollway to Reston, VA where Apple will be opening a brand-new Apple Store. Check out the AIM for iPhone icon playing on the Apple Store window display.

If you're near the area and have a few hours to burn with a few hundred of iPhone and Mac fans, stop by the Apple Store Reston on Saturday, August 15th before 10am. I'll be there and you can meet other AOL'ers who will be in attendance.

See you Saturday!

Lee Givens
AOL iPhone Product Lead

When I was younger, Friday nights meant getting together with friends and going to see the latest movie that hit the theaters. Back then, GI Joe was a cartoon, not a feature film, and when we wanted to find out what was playing, we called 777-FILM. That's when I was first introduced to The Voice. You know the one; he'd answer the phone with "Hello and welcome to Moviefone. If you know the name of the movie you wish to see, press 1..." Over the years, Mr. Moviefone became enshrined in popular culture with appearances on Seinfeld and burned into the minds of a generation of moviegoers like me. I even got offered a job by Mr. Moviefone once (Seriously. He called me and I half expected him to say, "If you want to work in software, press 1").

Now, of course, when I want to see a film, I whip out my iPhone, and with the Moviefone app, I can find a theater near me with GPS, view trailers, read plot summaries and actor bios, even get behind the scenes or movie premiere photos. It's all very high tech and wonderful and a luxury I couldn't have imagined all those years ago. But I can't help be nostalgic from time to time of the era when finding out what was at the movies meant picking up a phone... and actually dialing. I wonder if years from now, today's kids will look back and think fondly of the time when they used to flick through film listings on their iPhone.

Anyway, if you haven't tried it yet, check out the Moviefone app before you check out what's showing. And as always, let us know what you like and don't like about it. We always appreciate your comments.

See you at the movies!

Epilogue: Another icon of the silver screen when I was growing up was, of course, John Hughes. With films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to his credit, he helped to define a generation, not to mention made dozens of budding actors and actresses into household names. The movies - or at least my version of the movies - wouldn't be quite the same without Mr. Hughes, and so it seems appropriate to say thanks for making us laugh, for making us cry, and for being part of my life in those wonderful, scary formative years. Rest In Peace, John Hughes.

When you use one of our iPhone apps - AIM, AOL Radio, Pixcetera, Daily Finance, or the many other apps that we produce - you're tasting the fruits of a lot of people's labor - software engineers, designers, quality assurance folks, product managers, and more. But there's a set of unsung heroes that I want to call out today - the hard working men and women who work behind the scenes keeping all these services running.

It takes a lot of effort - not to mention thousands of servers - to deliver the billions of instant messages we process each day, or to serve up thousands of hours of streaming radio, or to deliver millions of pictures and maps and stock quotes and movie times. Behind every one of those services is a system administrator - or more often than not - a team of system administrators - that make sure that the machines keep running, that your data stays safe, and that we can continue to provide you with the services that power all those great iPhone apps you love.

We usually take these folks for granted; most of the time the work they do is invisible. It's only when something goes wrong that we notice just how much we are in their debt each day. So today, on System Administrator Appreciation Day, all of us would like to offer a huge thank you to all of the hard working IT professionals - across the industry and especially here at AOL - for helping us to deliver the apps that you use and rely on every day. We couldn't do it without you!

If you're among the many who are lucky enough to have an iPhone and to be able to travel overseas on vacation this year (or maybe you're unlucky enough to have to travel overseas every week on business), you'll soon run into the pain and expense of trying to use your phone while you're away from home. And while AT&T's charges for international roaming are stunning (I get charged for people who leave me voicemail even when I don't answer the phone?), as our friends at TUAW point out, it's no better if you're visiting the States, either.

I was recently in the UK on vacation, and I wanted to share couple tips you might not know about using your iPhone - without using the phone - after the jump.

Recently, several blogs have posted articles suggesting that they've been able to get push notifications from AIM intended for other people. These articles go on to imply that there's been an "exploit" of AIM or of Apple's push notification system that allows this behavior to occur.

All of us take our members' privacy very seriously, so although we've not heard from any users affected by this problem, we began investigating the issue at once, and we believe that unless you've purposefully hacked your phone, your IMs and push notifications remain safe.

Read on after the jump if you want the gory details.

So, now that you have push, are you struggling with what to do when you are signed in from your phone as well as your desktop? I tend to use a different screenname on my iPhone then I do for my desktop. This bleeds over from my sidekick years - I am a very heavy mobile IMer as a result of those years. However, I do use the same screenname from both locations time to time. Since AIM for iPhone supports switching screennames, I find this easy to manage and use. (To switch which account you are using, go to the My Info tab and hit the Sign Out button in the upper right corner. This will take you to the accounts management screen where you can add another account.)

But if you'd prefer to use the same screenname on your desktop and your iPhone, you'll need to know a little bit about how AIM routes messages. The way IM routing works when you are signed into multiple locations is simple - all IMs go to every instance, unless you set your status to Away at a particular location, then that location does not receive any IMs. For example, say you are signed into both AIM for Mac as well as iChat with the same screenname. Normally, any message you receive will get delivered to both AIM and iChat. But if you set yourself Away in iChat, then IMs you receive will be delivered to AIM but not to iChat. This means that if you set yourself to Away on your iPhone and you are signed into another location you will stop receiving IMs as well as push notifications on your iPhone. Note - if you are only signed into one location, even if your status is Away, you'll still get IMs and push notifications at that location.

That's how it's supposed to work.

Unfortunately, right now we have a bug, and this does not work for the iPhone AIM clients. We are working to resolve this issue and hope to have it fixed soon. Hopefully it will be a fix we can make in the network and it won't require you to download an updated app. I'll keep you posted. Also, we are looking for ways to update how we do IM routing and are open to suggestions, so if you have ideas, let us know.

Some of the ideas we're experimenting with include:

• doing what we did for SMS notifications and adding a pref so you can choose to only receive the first push notification from each screenname that sends you an IM
• changing the logic so that we stop sending push notifications the moment you respond from a different client. The problem here is knowing when to start sending notifications back to the phone. Say you walk away from your computer and the person you were IMing with kept IMing you. At what point should we start sending you push notifications again? We have even gotten crazy and thought about using bluetooth detection ;-)

As you can see, it isn't that straight forward, but we are working on it and would love to hear your ideas.

Since I brought up being signed into multiple locations, this might be a good time to talk about AOLSystemMsg. Do you remember how you used to get a message from that screenname when you signed in from multiple locations? That still happens except for in two cases. The first case is when you are signed into two instances from the same IP address. For example, if you sign into iChat and AIM for Mac on the same computer you will not receive the message. Recently, we've also turned this off for products using Open AIM - see http://dev.aol.com/aim for more information. If your second session is an application based on Open AIM, like AIM for iPhone, you will not get this message. We are making some enhancements so that we can offer you that information back in the iPhone AIM client, so keep an eye out for that, too.

I hope that helps describe how to best use AIM when you're logged in from more than one place. We're continuously making improvements and listening to your feedback, so please keep it coming.

We've heard from a number of you regarding issues you've had using your AOL or AIM screenname to log into iTunes or the App Store on iPhone OS 3.0. We've reported the issue and are working closely with Apple to resolve the issue. Until it is, though, if you want to purchase new music or update an app, you can still log into iTunes on your Mac or PC with your screenname and sync your purchases back to your iPhone. One other thing: you probably don't want to switch to a new Apple ID to resolve this problem. Doing so will mean that your existing music and app purchases will be bound to a different account than your new ones, and you won't solve the problem for apps that you may want to update in the future. We're trying to push this along just as fast as we can, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

After long anticipation, I'm very pleased to announce that AIM and AIM (Free Edition), both with push notifications, are now available in the App Store. We've been waiting since the iPhone came out to be able to bring you an instant messaging app that works the way you expect, with notifications when you're doing something else like web surfing or listening to AOL Radio, and thanks to Apple's Push Notification framework, we finally can. While we were in there, we took the opportunity to tweak a few things as well. We fixed a couple of compatibility issues with iPhone OS 3.0, improved the speed and stability by making a number of internal changes in the app, and tweaked the fonts a little bit so that we could get more of your conversation on screen, as many had asked. For customers of the paid edition of AIM, we've also added one of your most requested features - support for landscape mode in just about every screen. We'll be continuing to improve our landscape support, and making the feature available in the Free Edition in a future release, but rest assured we're listening to all of your feedback, so please keep it coming. I know a number of you have been frustrated by the wait, especially those of you who've had issues since upgrading to OS 3.0. To all of you, we're sorry. As you know, like all other developers, our apps go through an approval process which, with all of the great apps coming for OS 3.0, took a little longer than anyone would have wanted. But now it's here, and we're thrilled to be able to bring it to you. Future postings will go over some more tips on how to use push, including the difference between Push Notifications and SMS notifications (and when you might want to use one vs. the other), what the "24 hour" sign in means, and how to control the alerts and vibrations you get with push technology. We'll also dive a little deeper into some of AIM's other features, like SMS text integration and location sharing. But for now, enjoy the update. If you're not seeing it in iTunes on your desktop, try quitting and restarting the app. (Note that deleting AIM on the iPhone and reinstalling, as some have suggested, may delete your past conversation state).

Wow, the team has been working for months on our newest iPhone App - MapQuest 4 Mobile on the iPhone. You can now get the full power of MapQuest on your iPhone or iPod touch. MapQuest has been on the iPhone for a while as a Web App, but now you can get the next evolution of maps & directions on your iPhone! MapQuest for Mobile on the iPhone allows you to save Maps and Routes on MapQuest.com and retrieve them directly on your iPhone (My Places account is necessary). We've even added a handy MapQuest place carousel at the bottom of the screen to allow you to easily locate hotels, movie theaters, gas stations and much more.

Check out Jarrod's post on the MapQuest blog for more info!



Want more information? Visit: http://wireless.mapquest.com
If you would like to download the feature screenshots, click here. To see the feature-by-feature YouTube video, click here.

Thanks!
Lee Givens
AOL Mac & iPhone Product Lead

As someone who has been watching the mobile industry evolve now for over 10 years it is interesting to watch how the iPhone phenomenon is causing so many industry stalwarts to run in circles chasing Apple's success. Whether the focus is touch screens or shiny black finishes, competitors are trying desperately to copy Apple's moves to achieve their own success.

The latest iPhone-spawned craze seems to be the need for every OEM and mobile operator to launch an application store for their devices.

Of course this is a great thing for the big device brands and for consumers, so the question is why didn't they do this first?

The answer lies with one big advantage Apple has over all other device OEMs (and certainly over any mobile operator) – a simple device support matrix.

Apple has the unique advantage of only having to support a small number of device iterations. As a result of having been in the market longer, the traditional mobile OEMs and carriers have the difficult burden of having to support a wide variety of device types and platform characteristics.

The goal for all App Stores is (or, rather, should be) to provide a one-for-all application download experience to support the OEM / provider's brand. As the number of supported device iterations grows, delivering on that goal becomes increasingly complex.

Apple has, at most, four devices that they need to worry about -- two generations of the iPhone and two generations of the iPod Touch.

Apple's support matrix looks something like this:




Looking at the above table, all four of these devices have the same screen resolution, the same input method (touch screen), the same form factor and button configuration (one button + volume controls) and nearly identical hardware comprising them. So, in practical terms, Apple really has only two, maybe three, devices to support.

Now let's compare that support burden with the next most simple device platform: RIM. If we assume that RIM will focus primarily on their top four device families (the Storm, Bold, Curve and Pearl), they still have an enormous support burden compared to Apple.

Among these four device families, Blackberry devices come in three different resolutions, three different input methods (touch screen, 1- and 2-letter QWERTY keyboards with trackball), two form factors (candy bar and flip), and some variance on hardware (GSM, CDMA, with / without WiFi or external displays).

So Blackberry's device support matrix looks like this:




These two images illustrate the challenge other OEMs have to overcome to create an experience as elegant as the iPhone's. And RIM probably has it the easiest of the rest of the OEMs (excluding Palm, see below). Nokia and Windows Mobile both come in more flavors than ice cream and Android is set to be modified and iterated by any number of OEMs / ODMs so their app store will quickly become fragmented as well.

Palm is perhaps the one exception to this bunch. Palm has made a conscious decision to keep things simple by starting fresh with the Palm Pre. They will have one App Catalog for one device. Of course more WebOS devices will be introduced but I expect Palm to follow Apple's lead by keeping things simple by keeping device specs similar.

The Apple advantage is not unique to the iPhone platform either. If you look at their lineup of laptops and iMacs, it's also incredibly simple. One of the writers at EdibleApple.com has a great post (http://www.edibleapple.com/why-a-simple-product-line-is-integral-to-apples-success/) about how Apple's simplified product portfolio has been a big benefit to consumers. I would add that Apple's approach has also been a big benefit to developers and to Apple themselves.

As Edwin mentioned in his post, the team and I were featured in an Apple video. We had a lot of fun shooting this video and were very excited when it went live. I was a bit surprised by the extent at which I was featured in this video. It has been a team effort to get AOL "Back on the Mac" and it wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the hard work and dedication of the entire team. I am lucky to be able to work with such a talented team. Amongst my posts about products, features, etc., I will periodically post entries introducing the different members of the team. I hope this gives folks the chance to learn more about the people that make all our apps possible.