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hacksugar: iPhone 4 jailbreak accomplished but not ready for public release
When we talk about "jailbreaking" the iPhone, that means opening up the underlying file system on the phone for full read/write access; on a vanilla iPhone, only the 'userland' data is accessible to users and apps. The term is derived from Unix jargon, where a "chroot jail" is the limited section of the file system that an underprivileged app can access. A jailbreak allows third parties to install and run any software they want, rather than the subset of iPhone apps approved by Apple and distributed through the App Store. Before Apple's official SDK was released, jailbreak apps were the only native (non-web) apps on the platform aside from the built-in apps that shipped with the device. As TUAW has posted about in the past, the jailbreak software community is a hotbed of innovation and creativity. Many iPhone technologies debuted first in the hobbyist jailbreak community before ever appearing in official Apple firmware. Jailbreak-first features included copy and paste, spell checking, application folders, rotation inhibition, multitasking, find-my-iPhone, and more. In terms of iPhone possibility and expression, the jailbreak community has led the way. Over the weekend, Redmond Pie announced that the iPhone 4 was successfully jailbroken. This proof-of-concept jailbreak showed that the new iPhone model could be opened for general file access. It is not, however, a "production" jailbreak; because the proof-of-concept used proprietary Apple code, it will not be released to the public. There is no word yet as to when a more intellectual-property-friendly version will be finished, but one guesses "soon" -- with no rush for the all-volunteer development team. Screen shots of the new jailbreak follow in the gallery below, to provide you with a sneak peek at what's coming up. %Gallery-96477%
TUAW tested: iPhone 4 works with original iPhone dock
Editor's Note: We inadvertently neglected to acknowledge the other tipsters who brought this feature to our attention. Thank you to Alan Wyman, 'iPhone Coder,' DocRock & everyone else who pointed this out. Over on Twitter, user TheiJcaP tipped us to the fact that the new iPhone 4 does work with the original iPhone dock. Being fanatical OCD maniacs moderately well organized, one and all, we headed off to our carefully labeled "outdated iPhone parts" box and pulled out some spare docks for units that are no longer serviceble. Just as promised, the iPhone 4 fit perfectly into the dock, and even now my new unit is continuing its initial sync (yes, I do have a lot of data to transfer) in a happily near-vertical position. This is just one of those tiny little bits of synchronicity that bring joy in life. It's not going to clean up oil spills or end disease and suffering, but what a lovely discovery and a pleasant surprise in our more immediate day-to-day world.
iOS 4.0 firmware release expected momentarily, quick Terminal tip to check
Last year, we showed you how to check for the 3.0 firmware release via the terminal command line. As we move into the new year, TUAW reader Mike K writes in, saying "Being compulsive, is the terminal command to check for 3.0 the same as for 4.0? I'd love to know..." Hey Mike, yes the terminal command is more or less the same as last year, but we have a slight improvement for you, so your system will speak to you when the new firmware goes live. #! /bin/csh curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version | grep -i Restore | grep -i iPhone | grep -i 4.0 if ($? == 1) then echo "Nothing yet..." else say "FOUR POINT OH FIRMWARE IS NOW AVAILABLE" endif sleep 30 Save this script into a new file (e.g. "checkingscript") and chmod it to 755 so it will be executable. (The line that starts with "curl" and ends with "4.0" is a single line -- so make sure you don't split it in two. Also make sure you put a carriage return at the end of the "sleep 30" line.) Then run the script from the command line using a repeat command, e.g. repeat 5000 ./checkingscript. The built-in "sleep" command ensures that it will wait 30 seconds between attempts. If you are not using csh or tcsh, just type csh at the command line before issuing the repeat command. The script works by checking for iPhone restore firmware that has 4.0 in the name. When it finds this, the curl command will return a success (exit status 0 versus a failed exit status of 1) and your system will speak to you using the OS X "say" command. You will need to select your firmware using the iPhone or iPod touch model. They are: iPhone 3G: iPhone 1,2 iPhone 3GS: iPhone 2,1 iPod touch 2G: iPod 2,1 iPod touch 3G: iPod 3,1 These are embedded into the name, so a firmware restore named iPhone2,1_4.0_9B291_Restore.ipsw (I just made that name up) would be a 3GS restore file for 4.0. To download, copy the full phobos.apple.com URL and paste it into Safari's download window or use any other favorite method to retrieve the firmware. Then hold the Option key and click Update in iTunes. Navigate to the firmware (the ipsw file), select it, and 4.0's good to go. Of course, you can also download directly through iTunes as soon as the update is available.
hacksugar: Make your own iPad car kit
If you're going on a car trip and want to bring your new iPad along for the kids as you ride, you might want to consider putting together a super simple presentation system that fits easily onto any existing seat back or can be slung between the two front seats. Behold the iBag, which TUAW discussed briefly back in a March post about cheap accessories. A few enhancements will transform your iBag into the perfect iPad presentation system; it's a veritable iPad car kit!
hacksugar: Bringing back the on-screen keyboard
You've got an iPad. You've got a Bluetooth keyboard that you love. Now imagine this: You're in bed. Your keyboard is somewhere downstairs. And yet, it's still in range and paired to your device. You can tap, tap, tap in the iPad Spotlight text entry field, but there's no keyboard for you to use. Frustrating, no? Sure, you can hop over to Settings and globally disable Bluetooth. But there has got to be a better/easier way to recover the on-screen keyboard without messing with Bluetooth, right? There is -- but it's only available right now if you're a developer (sign it using your credentials) or using a jailbroken system. I've posted a little utility, which I call KeysPlease over on my website (direct application link) and on the ModMyI repository (thanks, Kyle!). I've added it to my iPad dock, and now when I'm in the wrong room I just tap the app icon to retrieve my soft keyboard. Bluetooth remains unaffected and I can keep working on whatever I've been working on.
hacksugar: CueCat barcode scanner on the iPad
What do you get when you combine an iPad, a camera connection kit, and a USB CueCat barcode reader? Awesome, that's what you get. Sure you can use an iPhone with RedLaser and read barcodes sans extra equipment, but where's the challenge in that? The Mac Museum put together this awesome little hack, which reads the codes via the CueCat and then creates keyboard events to type out the codes as they are read. We're told the solution is completely plug-and-play -- no hacking, no jailbreaking required. It should work with programs like Price Grabber, where you normally type in the UPCs manually, and with Numbers -- although apparently it doesn't seem to work with Grocery IQ. Cool stuff. The Mac Museum picked up their USB CueCat for $8.88 buy-it-now with $5.55 shipping on eBay.
hacksugar: Mirror your jailbroken iPad display with DisplayOut
Ryan Petrich's latest utility for jailbroken iPads just hit the Cydia store. DisplayOut for iPad sells for US$1.99. It allows you to mirror the iPad's screen out to an external display via an attached VGA or component/composite cable. Similar to earlier iPhone solutions like TV Out and ScreenSplitr, DisplayOut extends video out to the larger iPad screen. DisplayOut provides a great way to create application videos. It supports both in-app and Springboard video, so you can record complete sequences including application launch and run time. If there is any negative to the application, it is that the video doesn't quite fill the screen, and I couldn't find a way to increase the screen size; that's why the video on the Magic Window review appears on the small side. Positives include the excellent Settings integration. You can easily enable and disable video mirroring with a simple switch change. An adjustable refresh rate lets you increase video quality, albeit at the cost of more system resources. I found that some applications slowed down exponentially as the refresh rate grew. All in all, DisplayOut is a great little utility for anyone who has a jailbroken iPad, a video cable, and a desire to display or record iPad action. Note that you will need a recording device on the other end of the cable (VCR, DVD-R, or a video in device for your computer) to capture videos.
hacksugar: Wireless iTunes syncing makes it to jailbroken iPhones
Cables, schmables. Why occupy valuable USB slots when you can make iTunes data fly magically over virtual intertubes to and from your home computer? New to the jailbreak world, Wi-Fi Sync introduces over-the-air sync to iPhone devices. The application works like this: you install a client app on your desktop computer (10.5 and 10.6 Mac only at this time), which you can download for free from the Wi-Fi Sync website. Then, run the $9.99 Wi-Fi Sync application on your iPhone. Your phone will appear in iTunes' sources list as a connected device. You can then sync your device, just as if it were plugged in at a standard USB port.
Add GPS to your jailbroken WiFi iPad with BTstack GPS
A while back, TUAW took a peek at RoqyBluetooth, a GPS solution for jailbroken iPads and iPod touches. Today, Matthias Ringwald has released BTstack GPS. Like Roqy, BTstack GPS offers integrated core location for Bluetooth-enabled devices that lack an onboard GPS system. Retailing for $5 (via the Cydia store), BTstack GPS was written by the same developer who created BTstack, allowing iPhone OS units to communicate with external bluetooth devices including keyboards (you may be familiar with his BTstack Keyboard application), mice, Wiimotes, and now, Bluetooth GPS dongles. The software requires you to disable Apple's Bluetooth in the settings app. You then launch the GPS app, wait for your system to detect the external GPS unit, select it, pair, and then wait again as the GPS unit finds locks to the medium orbit satellites that provide GPS data. This can take a minute or two, so be a little patient. Once the lock finishes and the GPS data starts flowing, Ringwald's app will update, showing your current location on a map.
hacksugar: Working with iPad-mounted USB drives
Recently, TUAW has looked at using the iPad's camera connection kit to attach and use USB drives. If you're using a jailbroken iPad, you'll be pleased to discover that the camera connection kit allows you to connect a USB stick or hard drive and access it from your iPad. That means you can easily bring extra files on-the-go and copy them into third party (i.e. no, you're not going to update your iTunes library on the go...yet) applications. Mounting drives is the province of a built-in application called MobileStorageMounter. It's part of the iPad's core services. When it sees a new FAT or HFS USB device, it attempts to mount that device using standard Unix services. If it finds a built-in DCIM folder on the drive, it launches the iPad Photos application. If not, it throws up the dialog shown at the top of this post, reporting that the attached USB device is not supported. As far as you're concerned, that error message is good news. It means that the device has been properly mounted and is ready for use. If you do not see the dialog, it's time to take one of two courses of action: a quick fix that works most of the time and a thorough fix that always works. Read on to learn more...
iPad hacksugar: iPad 3G hacked to send native SMS
Here's a cool little find for a quiet Sunday. MuscleNerd of the iPhone dev team has managed to allow his jailbroken 3G iPad to send command-line SMS text messages. This hack only works with SIM cards that have already paid for an SMS plan, in this case a T-Mobile SIM that was downsized to microSIM dimensions. (More about using T-Mobile SIMs here.) The 3G iPad was jailbroken using Spirit. The hack works by communicating directly with the iPad baseband, using standard AT commands. As of yet, Apple's MobileSMS application, the SMS application that normally appears on iPhone home screens, has not worked on the iPad. Will standard phone call service be next? Using minutes from a downsized SIM? Wait and see. [via RedmondPie] Thanks, Steven Kappler.
iPad hacksugar: More than you wanted (or needed) to know about Apple's iPad Camera Connection Kit
The iPad. It is awesome. And the iPad camera connector kit is even more awesome. It works with USB keyboards. It works with USB headsets (seriously, I just spent a half hour on the phone with Kyle Kinkade on Skype voice chat that way). And, of course, it does photos. You can import photos from cameras, from SD cards, and even from iPhone OS devices. But that's not the sum of what most people really want to do with their iPad USB ports. What people want, what they really really want, is to insert a USB memory stick and read arbitrary files off and write arbitrary files onto that device. On that end, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is this. USB drives do mount properly and show up in the system as /dev/disk2s1. Yay. You can even add more drives via a hub. The iPad supports both FAT and HFS+ drives. The bad news is this. As iPhone developer Dustin Howett discovered, that mount point is sandboxed away from normal developer use. You cannot read from or write to that disk using standard iPhone SDK applications. Another unnamed developer did a little digging. He discovered that the iPhone supports the same kind of Image Capture Core engine that is used on the Macintosh. Unfortunately, that engine (which is backed by the Mobile Storage Mounter application in Core Services) appears to be limited at this time. The only data that can mount and be read is DCIM folders, and only through the Photos application. That's not to say that the functionality for reading arbitrary disk storage is not available -- it is -- but it has been blocked off from general use at this time. (Yes, a jailbreak will easily bypass this limit.) Posting the images mounted notification com.apple.mobile.images_mounted Posting a notification that regular storage has been mounted com.apple.mobile.storage_mounted This remains in line with Apple's user empowerment policy. Just as the UIImagePickerController can only access pictures that the user selects, just as the UIDocumentInteractionController can only present documents chosen by the user, the USB system (for now) will only offer access to pictures that the user decides to move to the iPad. Should the demand for a more general shared documents approach be loud enough and strong enough, history has shown that Apple can and does respond to the clamor of the buying public's requests.
hacksugar: Hiding Apple's built-in applications
TUAW reader Joe Thompson pointed us to this hint over at Mac OS X Hints that helps you hide the standard applications that ship with the iPhone, without jailbreaking. This allows you to use those spots for your preferred 3rd party alternatives without sacrificing valuable home screen real estate or messing with a lot of ugly application rearrangement in iTunes. Thompson writes, "I've removed Stocks, Weather, and Notes, as I have better 3rd party apps for all three." You'll need a Windows-based system to sync your iPhone and at least a trial copy of iBackupBot. The technique involves enabling parental restrictions and editing your springboard property list (the file that controls how your iPhone home screen behaves) to flag the application and update the icon layouts. The iBackupBot program allows you to replace that property list file on your iPhone after modifying it on Windows. The Mac OS X Hints write-up has complete directions. At this time, we haven't yet found an OS X solution to do the same for an un-jailbroken phone, although we are consulting with some of our favorite sources to see if they can come to the rescue for non-Windows users.
hacksugar: Install the 3.1 Clock on your 3.2 iPad
Do you like the iPhone clock? Do you miss the iPhone clock? Do you wish the iPhone clock would install and work on your 3.2 iPad? Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has posted some handy how-to instructions on his personal blog. The secret lies in getting hold of a 3.1 compiled build (normally via jailbreak and sftp), editing its Info.plist file, and re-signing the app so it can be installed via Xcode. This is a developers-only solution, and not for the faint of heart. The application can be signed and installed only onto those iPads that have been registered with Apple at the developer portal. You'll need to be comfortable editing Info.plist files (using a property list editor or text editor), and installing apps using the Xcode organizer window. Although I confirmed that the install process works (it did not, by the way for Weather or Stocks), I have not been able to test the actual alarm features because, well, I don't actually see an alarm interface when I run the app. But it's still early days as far as this hack goes, and maybe I missed a step somewhere. Stroughton-Smith reports that many features work fine in the sandbox and can still set system alarms. That's a pretty handy feature for anyone who wants the iPad to wake them in the morning -- even if I still can't quite figure out how to do it. I had no problem using World Clock. The Stopwatch worked fine. But, along with the alarm, I couldn't get the Timer to work. If you have some work-arounds for those features, jump in into the comments.
hacksugar: Putting iPod touch GPS to the test with roqyBluetooth
A few weeks ago, I wrote lovingly about GPS. For me, at least, GPS on the iPhone OS family is often more about the social features that location unlocks than about simple positioning. With GPS, you can track your trips to share with friends and family, see what people have been Yelp-ing about, and find what's happening right now, right near you. When I heard about GPS for iPod touches, I got excited. For a while, I've been reading about roqyBluetooth (aka roqyBT). It's a system hack that allows you to connect an iPod or an early model iPhone to an external GPS receiver over Bluetooth. Yesterday, I finally got a chance to put RoqyBT to the test. Retailing for 8 Euros (about $11), roqyBluetooth is a jailbreak application sold through Cydia and the Rock Store. Its Bluetooth stack implementation hooks into the iPod's Core Location system services. In use, any application that normally queries for Core Location data gains access to the Bluetooth-originated GPS data (including location, elevation, and so forth) just as it would normally receive WiFi positioning or, in the case of the iPhone, cell tower positioning. It works. I bought a simple Bluetooth GPS unit from Semsons.com for about $20. After installing roqyBluetooth and pairing it with my BT GPS, I was able to run Trailguru and track my progress through several trips as I walked and drove to various locations. The Trailguru results were similar to the trails I recorded simultaneously on an iPhone 3GS using the same software. All in all, success. So what were the ups and downs of the process?
iPhone hacksugar: Creating a MyWi WiFi hotspot with your jailbroken phone
Here's the thing. You know, and I know, that AT&T has not yet enabled tethering in the US for the iPhone, while carriers all across the globe have already given their iPhone customers the ability to use their phones as wireless modems for their laptops. You and I also know that strictly speaking tethering falls outside the normal terms of use for your iPhone data contract -- and that there are jailbreak solutions to get around this (hopefully temporary) constraint. That having been said, you know, and I know, that there are times when your cable modem goes down and you have a bandwidth emergency. You're not planning to abuse your data contract, but you do need a backup plan for those rare instances so you can get some work done. Enter MyWi, for jailbroken iPhones. Selling for ten bucks via the Rock Store and Cydia, MyWi enables tethering on your 3.1+ iPhone (2G, 3G, 3GS) and creates a personal Wi-Fi hotspot. It's as if AT&T had actually enabled the feature on-board. What's more, it works just like a real hotspot does. Unlike other solutions that require you to create ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks on a Mac and then connect to them from your iPhone, MyWi works like the Sprint/Verizon MiFi. You can connect to your iPhone data from an iPod, a laptop, or even an iPad. They'll see your iPhone as just another Wi-Fi hotspot. If security is an issue, MyWi offers optional WEP with a customizable key. TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page. Promo code requests are not guarantees of reviews.
