Thanks to TUAW reader Adam, I was pointed in the direction of YouTube a few minutes ago to watch a video of a purported stun gun accessory for iPhone 3 / 3GS / 4. While I'm 99.9 percent certain that this is a spoof, the other .1 percent is wishing that the US$24.99 Stun Fone was actually available for sale. It would be so handy for those situations where someone cuts in a line ahead of me...

A little research on Amazon showed that stun guns are readily available at about this price, so setting one up to be triggered by a press of the volume buttons on an iPhone isn't exactly out of the realm of reality. It would probably also require something other than the iPhone's battery to charge it up.

To Jeff and his roommate, the "inventors" -- if this sucker is for real, we here at TUAW will be happy to put a review unit through its paces. Just let us know.

Video (slightly NSFW) is on the next page.

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Wil Shipley is probably the premiere Mac developer -- he co-founded The Omni Group, and now runs Delicious Monster, whose Delicious Library app pretty much embodies the best of this platform we love so much. Wil kindly sat down to talk with me at last week's MacTech 2010 conference here in Los Angeles, and we chatted about what's next for Delicious Library, what the response was like to his company's Noogle Noggles app, and what he believes is in store for Apple's upcoming Mac App Store.

Shipley began by saying he was a little disappointed with the way Noogle Noggles worked out -- the idea was, of course, to beat Google Goggles to the App Store, and Google worked faster than he expected. "We thought we were going to beat them by two and a half months, but they beat us by a day." Still, the app has seen a solid chunk of downloads so far. "Last I checked it was 35,000 people, and I'm like that's a pretty good number of people for working on something for a month."

Photo by Flickr user Inju, licensed under Creative Commons.

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Apple has filed a patent featuring some concepts for scrollable menus and toolbars that could eventually be used in the next version of OS X, 10.7 Lion. The new patent covers all kinds of things, from extra UI elements in the OS X desktop to special iOS menus and features. But they all look like what you see above -- an almost Cover Flow-like scrollable interface that boils down a series of functions or menus into a set of icons.

I like it -- while the drawback seems to be that you'd have to really know what's available in the menu and where to find it (because you only see one icon at a time, you'll basically have to just get used to knowing what the other options are), the menu seems like a great way to put a lot of functionality easily reachable in a very small space. There are a few different "menu shapes" to help with this, too, from just one icon rotating to the foreground, to an entire wheel of icons all with different features or choices on them.

As with all Apple patents, we'll note that these are strictly concepts, and there's no guarantee that a feature like this will actually show up in OS X. But it's good to see that Apple is still playing around with even very traditional UI interfaces like menus. Always nice to see innovation even in the growing-ever-older desktop space.

Testing has shown that the iPhone 3G's performance is much improved under iOS 4.2. Rene Ritchie at TiPb has posted a video (which you can watch after the break) of both iOS 3.0 and 4.2 (the gold master) running on an iPhone 3G. Here's what he found.

Entering text into Apple's Notes app was acceptably snappy. Browsing the Web was also noticeably improved, especially scrolling and load times (over Wi-Fi). Some pinch-and-zoom was a bit laggy, but definitely worlds better than iOS 4.0 on a 3G.

Apple was recently hit with a class action lawsuit from California iPhone 3G user Bianca Wofford, who claims that Apple "...knowingly and intentionally released what it called a system software 'upgrade' that, in fact, made hundreds of thousands of the Third Generation iPhones (sic) that were exclusively tethered to AT&T data plans 'useless' for their intended purpose."

To Bianca and everyone else in her frustrating situation, we say sit tight. 4.2 is due this month.

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Like Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills 90210 and her flings with Dylan, Brandon and Colin, I've been around the block with mail clients, both on the Mac and PC side.That said, I prefer Mail.app. While Mail.app is simple enough for less advanced users, it also contains some niceties for power users. Here are five tips to help enhance your experience in Mail.app.

Threaded/Grouping Messages

Making sense of who said what and when they said it in relation to who in an email string can be mind numbing. Thankfully, Mail.app has the ability to organize emails by thread, lumping them together by subject.

To enable this feature, select on the mail box or folder that you'd like to view messages in threaded form and then click on "Organize by Thread" from the "View" menu. Messages will then be viewed as threads on an individual folder level basis. For instance, when applied to Folder 1, in which subfolders A, B and C reside, only messages residing in Folder 1 will be threaded.

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If you find yourself making the charts for your presentations in Numbers and would like an easy way to update them, the chart updating feature in Keynote does just that. With a simple click, your chart in Keynote is updated to reflect changes made in your Numbers spreadsheet.

This feature requires that you start your workflow in Numbers. After creating a chart, copy and paste it over to a slide in Keynote.

Now, whenever you click on the chart in your Keynote presentation, a button will appear atop of it.

Clicking on the arrow with the two circles on it will update the chart with figures from Numbers. Alternatively, you can click on the "edit data" button (after clicking on the chart) and then "update all" within the data table. However, it's important to note that you must save the Numbers file first before doing this. Otherwise, the changes won't carry over.

One of the more widely-used members of the iLife suite, iMovie, has been around for quite a while, although the original iMovie hit a dead end with iMovie HD 6 and was reborn as a completely new app as iMovie '08. It's now in version 9.0 as part of iLife '11, and this edition has both new features and a bit of added polish across the entire product. In this hands-on review of iMovie '11, I won't be pointing out every menu item or movie-making feature; instead I'll focus on the new capabilities.

I've been dabbling with video production since I was in high school (yes, television did exist back then). The tools available for editing video have come a long way in that time, but for the most part they've still been rather difficult to master. iMovie '11 introduces some new tools that make it easy for just about anyone to take advantage of expert-level effects that would have been difficult or impossible for novices to achieve before. Read on to hear about some of those tools and how they work.

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South Korea's KT Corporation will begin taking iPad pre-orders "this week." Initially banned by the Korea Communications Commission, the iPad eventually passed inspection and has been highly anticipated by customers. KT Corp. hopes to begin shipments in November. All models will be sold, though a firm release date was not available as of this writing.

Meanwhile, KT Corp. competitor SK Telecom is preparing to release the Galaxy Tablet. SK holds about half of the country's wireless market. The heat will be on in South Korea when this tablet battle commences.

[Via The Mac Observer]