Back in 2009, Stanford University started recording lectures given in its iPhone Application Development course and then placing them on iTunes, making them free for anyone to view. The course hit a million downloads in a matter of weeks, and now, two years later, here’s where we stand. The course remains the most popular item on Stanford’s iTunesU site, having clocked in 10 million downloads. And the school has released a new version of the course that focuses on iOS 5, the latest version of the iPhone/iPad operating system. You can download the course on iTunes (in HD video or standard-definition video) and start creating apps on your own.

The iPhone Application Development course is now listed in the Computer Science section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. There you will find 40+ free courses that will teach you to code….

via Stanford News

Create iPhone/iPad Apps in iOS 5 with Free Stanford Course is a post from: Open Culture

No more top hat and handkerchief. Marco Tempest uses iPods and iPhones to create magic for the 21st century. He calls himself a techno-illusionist. “I explore the borders between technology and magic,” says Tempest, “between what’s incredibly real and incredibly not.” Originally from Switzerland, Tempest now lives in New York City. He was featured in the internationally syndicated television series, The Virtual Magician, and his work can be viewed on a YouTube channel of the same name. His newest release, “iPod Magic–Deceptions,” features an application he developed to synchronize video playback on multiple screens. The App is called “MultiVid.” You can download it for free here, and learn how to use it here.

via Darren Brown

iPhone Magic by Techno-Illusionist Marco Tempest is a post from: Open Culture

Now a quick plug: Feel free to download our Free iPhone app, which includes free audio books, online courses, foreign language lessons, and intelligent podcasts. Or, better yet, simply visit Open Culture with your smart phone and get lots of smart media wherever you go…

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MIT OpenCourseWare Launches iPhone App is a post from: Open Culture

Simply called Developing Apps for iOS, the course features 20 video lectures (the last installment was uploaded just this week) and, somewhat fittingly, they’re all available on Apple’s iTunesU.

Paul Hegarty teaches the course, and he assumes that you have experience programming in C, and some familiarity with UNIX, object-oriented programming and graphical toolkits.

You can find Developing Apps for iOS in the Computer Science section of our big collection of Free Online Courses, along with two previous Stanford app development courses, both called iPhone Application Development.

Developing Apps for iPhone & iPad: A Free Stanford Course is a post from: Open Culture

The new Fotopedia Heritage app for the iPhone and iPad lets the world come to you. (Download here.) Drawing on 20,000 curated photos taken by thousands of photographers from the Fotopedia community, this FREE app lets you visit (at least virtually) 890 UNESCO World Heritage sites. In a matter of minutes, you can move from Notre Dame in Paris, to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, to Machu Picchu in Peru, to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. You get the picture. And speaking of pictures, it’s worth noting that all photos are released under a Creative Commons license. A very nice touch. Let me finally mention that the app has some smart mashup features, including maps showing the location of each site, plus Wikipedia entries offering background information on each location. You can start downloading the app right here. (Many thanks to Jane for calling this out.)

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Visit 890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites with Free iPhone/iPad App is a post from: Open Culture

PS Does this still mean that Apple can void your warranty if you jailbreak your iPhone? I’m not sure whether that goes away or not…

US Government Opens Tech/Culture is a post from: Open Culture

For more free films, see our collection of Free Movies Online…

National Film Board of Canada Launches Free iPad App is a post from: Open Culture

Question: If you fail to stop something bad happening to you is it the same as being complicit in the act?

Answer: There is a complicated literature in moral philosophy about how to draw the distinction between doing and merely allowing harm and whether this distinction has moral significance. Without trying to navigate that deep intellectual thicket, it is still possible to begin to address your question. If I’m complicit in doing something bad, for instance, harming another person, then it seems I share the aim of my accomplices in harming someone else. I intend harm. By contrast, if I merely allow someone else to harm, I needn’t and typically don’t intend harm. While not intending harm, I may be indifferent to the harm. It depends. I may not be indifferent to the harm in question. I may be averse to it and perhaps would do something to prevent it but for some significant cost or risk involved in prevention. If the only way to save someone else from harm (whether intended or not) requires risking my life, then we cannot infer indifference from my failure to prevent harm. Perhaps I am averse to the harm and would prevent it if only the costs or risks of doing so had been less. However, if the cost or risk of preventing harm, especially significant harm, is non-existent or very low, then my failure to prevent the harm might be a sign of indifference. Most people would think that being genuinely indifferent to harms to others, especially significant harms, was bad but probably not as bad as actually intending comparable harm. Many people think that, all else being equal, it is morally worse to intend harm than to be indifferent to it. Some think that this difference makes doing harm worse than merely allowing it. Others doubt that it affects the permissibility of our actions and omissions but allow that it should color our assessments of the moral character of the agents in question.

via @philosophybites

Ask Philosophers Goes Mobile is a post from: Open Culture

City Poems – published today – … uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about.

They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), public burnings in Smithfield (“His guts filled a barrel”) or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades…

Like I said, an intriguing concept, and it seems as though Keegan has plans to bring this material to other mobile platforms. You can grab the app on iTunes here.

City Poems: A New Literary iPhone App is a post from: Open Culture

This week, Stanford has started rolling out a new App Development course (get it in video on iTunes), one adapted to the new iPhone operating system that Apple released last summer. Two lectures have been released so far. More will get rolled out on a weekly basis. Please note, these courses also appear in our collection of Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection of Free Courses from leading universities.

Stanford Releases New iPhone App Development Course is a post from: Open Culture