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Apple

Iphone 2.0x upgrades are not worth it, so far.

I upgraded my original iPhone to 2.0, but so far the point upgrades have not tempted me at all. I’ll just wait a bit longer to get an upgrade that’s worth upgrading for. So far it’s all small upgrades, a bug fix here and there but nothing major getting fixed.

So far, I still don’t have the urge to upgrade to an iPhone 3G. I’m still very happy with my 8GB original iPhone. 🙂

My family and friends are astonished that I haven’t upgraded, me, the gadget freak. But my rule is : if it is well made and works well and fulfills all your needs, why change ?

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Apple

Stanza just crashed my iphone

Stanza, the free ebook reader just crashed my Iphone, forcing an immediate reboot.
My hacked applications never did that !

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Apple

iPhone cancelled the sync (firmware 2.0)

If you upgrade your iPhone to firmware 2.0 and additionally have jailbroken and unlocked your iPhone using pwnage, you could have the same problems as I had with syncing my Mails (or alternatively, your Safari bookmarks).

I’ve found that by changing the permissions I was able to fix the problem.

More details can be found on the iPhone Link Page.

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Apple

iPhone v1 upgrade to v2

I just upgraded my version 1 iPhone to firmware version 2.0 using Pwnage, a tool released by the iPhone Dev Team.

The layout of the tool itself, as presented on the screen is very user friendly with lots of hints on what you need to do to upgrade – but still, a nice (short) help file is missing. For example, it could have stated up front that you need certain files and that you need to quit iTunes and iTunes helper (a helper program that runs as a background process). Instead it was mentioned on the page where I downloaded it, but not in the program itself.

As long as you quit iTunes and iTunes Helper (use the activity monitor to find and force quit that process) you should be fine. And as for the bootloader files you need, you can find them on the internet without much problems, and Pwnage will even help you find them (but again, I would have loved to see this mentioned in a help file as the required set list).

After the upgrade from 1.4 to 2.0, which took about 15 minutes in all, my phone seems to be just fine, but a few reminders for those who still need to upgrade :

  • After restoring with the custom firmware, you *can* restore your settings – this works great, I haven’t lost my “Notes”.
  • Installer.app is not ported, only Cydia is available
  • Worse: the applications themselves that are normally available in Cydia/Installer are not there : each application needs to be recompiled/rebuild for the toolchain v2. Apparently this is not such a big deal, but it does need to be done.
  • No Summerboard, so no themes ! I already miss my buuf theme !
  • The appstore is great, quite a few of nice and usefull programs are free, but when you can see 5 programs, each with a (small) price attached, that one open-source program (Convert, Band) did all together for free, you feel a bit of a let-down.
  • Another thing I miss : my own application written in jiggy.app, where you could program via javascript. I had written a program that showed me, depening on the time, the next train to work/home. I’m gonna miss that lil’ol’program, it helped me a lot.

My guess is that open-source authors will release new updated versions via Cydia, as long as they haven’t switched to the appstore.

Even then I would gladly buy a re-release of such a program via the appstore, for example “Convert” : a jailbreak v1.4 app that can convert just about anything into something else. It featured a downloadable list of currencies that you could refresh by shaking it, and has been of regular usage to me.

But so far I haven’t found any appstore converter to my liking, and so far I balk at paying for something I had for free.

We’ll just have to wait and see if Cydia gets more software available in the near future. Meanwhile, I’m looking through the appstore.

Categories
Apple Gaming

A new 3D iPhone game ! Written by one man ! Amazing !

Today I realised that iPhone programmers, who have struggled and battled with programming the iPhone since it’s release, using their own custom-written toolchains, have won.

When I read that somebody released a 3D game for the (jailbroken) iPhone, where you can walk about, and attack and be attacked, and he’s done it all on windows using a windows toolchain, writing everything from scratch, I just went ‘wow’.

It’s an early alpha release, but it still fires up my mind with Neverwinter Nights on the iPhone !

компютри втора употребаHero attacked by two monsters

You can read more about it here, but from the screenshots it looks to be on it’s way to becoming really cool !

Categories
Apple

If Cydia installer jumps back to Springboard – fix

I recently updated the Cydia package installer, and something went wrong. It crashed back to Springboard while updating itself, and refused to start up again.

All is not lost however. Remember that Cydia is actually a graphical front-end to the iphone port of apt-get, so you can still install applications via the command line. So drop down into Terminal and issue the following command :

<quote>apt-get install cydia</quote>

If you receive a permission denied, you are working as user ‘mobile’ and you need to be user ‘root’ to do this. So before you type in the above command, type ‘su root’ and the root password and then the apt-get command.

Of course, if the problem is the install package itself, this will not solve it. I tried the above a few hours later, and there was already a new release waiting to be downloaded, and this fixed the problem.

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Apple

Firmware 1.1.4 and Ziphone

I don’t know if Apple is giving up, or if the hackers are getting better and better, but this is following the same hacking curve as that of the psp : the first few firmwares were really hard to hack, and then it got easier, and after it there was nothing to it (at least, at the time I stopped following the psp scene firmware hacks often occurred the same day or week.

Firmware 1.1.4 for the iPhone is available, and the hacks are available as well.

Upgrading is easy : for best results, restore to a clean 1.1.4 and then launch ziphone (I did not try independence). One click is enough to jailbreak, activate and unlock your phone, including Youtube ! So far, I have not found any bugs or workarounds that are needed.

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Apple

Youtube Activation on iPhone Firmware 1.1.3

I’m struggling to activate Youtube on my iPhone, now running on firmware 1.1.3. When using firmware 1.1.3 this used to run just fine, but ever since I upgraded, it seems I no longer can use it.

I wasn’t exactly using it a lot, but it rankles me to have an application that is not working. So I’m looking for a fix.

So far, there seem to be some certificates that you can install from i.unlock.no. Just add this source link to your installer.app sources, and refresh. You can now see a folder unlock tools. However, the “Youtube activation” fix in there does not seem to help.

I’ll just need to continue looking, I’ll let you know when I find it.

[Update] It does work, with some extra mumbo jumbo. What worked for me was the following procedure. I don’t know if this you only part of these operations did the trick, or you need to do all of them. YMMV.

  • First of all, you need to go into settings, general and disable ‘Auto-Lock’ (this seems to be required !)
  • Connect it to iTunes via it’s cradle
  • Install the Youtube Activation fix found under unlock tools
  • If it wants to sync, let it sync with iTunes
  • After that, still cradled, reboot the iPhone

Afterwards, out of the cradle and on wireless, I tried Youtube and it worked.

[Update] This link has a guide for firmware 1.1.4

Categories
Apple

iPhone installer.app ?

Seems like everybody is waiting for the SDK to come along… rumors are wild, and people are believing everything they read. Only to find out it’s a fake all along.

Meanwhile, the well of free iphone programs called installer.app has been dry for the last 3 days, which is starting to bother me.

Since I had the iphone, I’ve been a compulsive installer checker, it’s like smoking a cigaret first thing in the morning. I wake up to the alarm sound of my iPhone, turn off airplane mode, and the very first thing I do is update the sources on installer.app to see what’s new.

Then I get out of bed.

Let’s hope that we get a message out of Apple, either confirming or denying the SDK coming this month. Either way, things will start up again…

Categories
Apple

A quick tip : adding a birthday to a contact in your MAC OS X Address Book

I find it very hard to add additional information to the Mac OS X Address book : there are only some basic fields, but when you want to add something like a birthday field I can’t find it, unless it’s a custom field.

I know the birthday field exists, as it is added in some of my contacts (don’t ask me how, probably via a long-ago sync with my windows mobile address book).

But just now I found a way to add them quickly – just use your iPhone to edit your contact, select from the bottom of the list the ‘additional field’ and choose the ‘birthday’ field. Easy as pie, and it’ll sync to your Mac Address Book as well !

Now why couldn’t this list of all the additional fields be just as easy and available on the mac ?