I saw a very amusing commercial ad on YouTube today. I wanted to load it up on my N95 and share it with some of friends. Of course, N95 has support for watching YouTube videos, but it’s a little too buggy. So I tried wicked way of downloading the video and then converting the FLV file into MP4 (yup, N95 uses the same format used by iPod and PSP). I tried nearly half-a-dozen of these converters, but none of them worked. While some had problems running on Vista, others were trial versions of commercial converting software.

I found a freeware called Free YouTube to iPod Converter which effortless converted YouTube videos into MP4. I just had to copy and paste the YouTube URL into the application and hit the convert button. As simple as that!

Download Free YouTube to iPod Converter

Tip: Choose “iPod High Quality” preset while converting YouTube Videos for N95. They will look good, even when you connect your N95 to your TV set using the AV cables provided with the handset.

Among the most requested software for the iPhone is a suite of applications to allow users to work with Microsoft Office files. One company that’s considering developing this is at once the most surprising and the most obvious: Microsoft itself.

A team of Microsoft developers is currently testing the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) with an eye toward making a version of Office, according to Fortune. The company is a long way away from making any commitments, though.

The iPhone currently allows users to view Word documents that come in as email attachments, but a version of Microsoft Office would allow these documents to be edited, too.

Source- Brighthand

Apple seeks engineers well versed in pattern recognition.

The iPhone’s popularity shows no signs of dying down. When the device was first unveiled in January 2007, it took the world by storm and sparked a buying frenzy when it launched a few months later.

The iPhone was clearly designed with consumers in mind, focusing on phone, music and video operations. Later updates even provided mobile access to Apple’s iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.

The only people seemingly left out of the iPhone equation were business users. Apple announced its plans to rectify that issue earlier this month with the rollout of the iPhone SDK and a beta of the upcoming 2.0 firmware. The 2.0 firmware brings a wealth of business-oriented features to the iPhone including push email support, Cisco IPsec VPN, WPA2/802.11x and support for Microsoft Exchange/ActiveSync.

A new job posting on Apple’s website reveals yet more technology that could be coming to OS X as well as the iPhone. The listing seeks a Handwriting Recognition Engineer that is well versed in pattern recognition, C/C++ coding, Cocoa programming and neural net algorithms.

Apple notes that the main area of focus will be handwriting technology for Mac OS X and that development/design “may extend beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone.”

The handwriting technology could make for an interesting alternative input option for the iPhone. The iPhone has been oft-criticized for its on-screen keyboard, so any form of handwriting may be welcome by iPhone/iPod touch users.

Usage could also extend to the rumored tablet-based MacBook which has yet to materialize and the ModBook which use’s Apple’s existing InkWell handwriting technology.

Apple has sent an email to developers in its program informing them that the second beta was available for download on the company’s Developer Connection web site.

“The second beta version of the iPhone SDK includes Interface Builder, Xcode IDE, Instruments, iPhone simulator, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis tool,” the site reads. Interface Builder is “an application for designing and testing user interfaces. Developers can use Interface Builder to create user interfaces that follow the Mac OS X human-interface guidelines by dragging user-interface elements from a palette of predefined controls and dropping them into the window or view they are configuring,” according to Apple.