Month: December 2008

Free iPhone Skins GiveAway

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 29, 2016

The guys over at Infectious emailed me to let me know that they would like to give away iPhone skins to the first 3 people to comment on this post. If you don't know about Infectious, you may want to check their products. They make adhesive skins for cars, laptops, and in our case, for iPhones.

What's really cool about it is that you can choose from top notch designs that are all made by renown artists. I haven't tried their iPhone skins but they are said to be easy to apply and easy to take off.

Unlike UniqueSkins, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, you can't create your own skin on the fly, however, you can submit your artwork and it might be approved to be sold on the site. Pretty cool, huh?

So we have 3 skins to give away for free to the the first 3 people that will leave a comment on this post. When you leave your comment, don't lie about your email address or else there is no way we'll be able to get in touch with you.

For more info about these artsy skins, hop over to Infectious.com.

Forget Fring, Use TruPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated February 22, 2017

Ok, don't forget Fring yet as it is a pretty good "all-in-one" app. But if you are using Fring solely for the Skype calls feature, then you might want to give a try at TruPhone, a VoIP app that was the first of its kind to be approved in the App Store.

So, what's so good about TruPhone? Well, I guess the best feature of this application is that it allows you to make VoIP calls from your iPhone to any phone in the world over wifi, and most importantly you can make calls even if you are not in a wifi zone. Now I have to admit this part is a bit shady. I had a look at Truohone's website and I can't figure out how this works exactly. It doesn't say anything about 3G or Edge but it does say that you can make calls even if you don't have an Internet connection. It's confusing but it still sounds great!

Fring allows you to do pretty much the same (and actually more) but the problem with Fring is that the app doesn't let you make VoIP calls over 3G or Edge, unless you implemented my Fring hack, of course... It seems that TruPhone is making this possible, without having to hack anything.

Let's have a look at what TruPhone can do for you:

Cheap international calls

The Truphone iPhone app routes iPhone calls over the Internet which can save you loads of money on international calls from your home country and on calls when you're abroad. You can look at the rates here. Calling a landline in my home country (France) is $0.06/minute but calling a cellphone there is $0.30/minute. All calls in the US are $0.06/minute.

Use Truphone Anywhere

If you're not online Truphone Anywhere can still route your call over the internet. So now you can make cheap VoIP calls even when you're not connected to a Wi-Fi network. How does that work? I'm not sure...

Free calls worldwide

Calls to other connected Truphone users are FREE, worldwide. So if you and your friends all download Truphone, you can call each other for FREE, wherever you are in the world!

Know who's online

A new feature lets you know which of your Truphone contacts is online. It's great news if you want to make FREE Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi calls on your iPhone because calls between connected users are always FREE Worldwide.

Receive calls for free

You can receive FREE Truphone calls whenever you're connected to a Wi-Fi network.

iPod Touch users for once shouldn't feel left aside. If you have a headset with a microphone you can also use this great app on your iTouch, which means that you can turn your iPod Touch into a phone!!!

Truphone is free and you may click here to download Truphone for iPhone or Truphone for iPod Touch.

One question still lingers in my mind though... Is AT&T ok with that?

Copy/Paste Coming To The iPhone This Friday. Is It For Real?

Sébastien Page ∙ December 11, 2008

We've heard that before and we've had our share of disappointment about the copy/paste options on the iPhone but this time it seems that it's finally around the corner. Best of all, you don't need to hack your iPhone or even install applications. What? So how does it work?

Unlike other approaches, it works with the two apps that matter most, Mail and Safari, and gets around Apple's onerous App Store terms through a clever combination of javascript bookmarks and web services.

This new service is called PasteBud and as you can see in this video, it works using two bookmarks in Safari. The first bookmark prepares and loads the page you are viewing, and let's you select the text you want to copy with your finger. From there, you can open your Mail app and paste the text in there or you can even paste the text in the text field of another web page if you want to.

Looks pretty sweet, eh? Well, don't get too excited as I believe this is BS. But you know me, I'm always the devil's advocate... I do hope I am wrong on this one as I would love to finally be able to copy/paste on my iPhone. My biggest disappointment remains that Apple still hasn't made this available and that we have to jump through hoops and holes to get something that should have been on the iPhone since June 27, 2007.

What do you think? Real? Fake?

ZiPhone.org is For Sale. Goodbye ZiPhone, I Will Miss You

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated October 9, 2018

Zibri, creator of ZiPhone just announced on his blog that ZiPhone.org is for sale. Since the birth of his child last month, Zibri is obviously busy with his family, which I totally understand.

For those of you who are not familiar with the ZiPhone, it was the first jailbreaking software developed to make the jailbreaking process a child play. I mean, ZiPhone was and still remains my favorite jailbreaking tool. Hands down! ZiPhone worked under firmware 1.x but wasn't updated for firmware 2.x earlier this year.

So why was ZiPhone my favorite jailbreaking tool? For one, it was the only software that never crashed on me. But most importantly, it was so easy to use that a caveman could have done it... You simply had to download Ziphone, install, plug your iPhone, click jailbreak and wait a few seconds. *Sigh*, I miss those days...

So now the domain name is for sale. If you're a little bit into Internet Marketing, that might be interesting for you. The website has a PR6 and countless backlinks. I would love to buy this domain name but I don't think I have enough in the bank right now to afford it. If you're interested, you'll have to spend $50 on the front end, just to be able to bid on the domain name. The highest bidder will then get it.

Below is a copy of what Zibri wrote on his blog:

It was an incredible ride, guys, and I'm sincerely grateful to everybody who made this happen. As some of you may know, from the 7th of November 2008 I'm a father. All my efforts are now focused on my family then, later, I'll start some other project maybe related with the iPhone, maybe not. So, from now the ziphone.org domain (Pagerank 6 on Google) is FOR SALE. Here's how the sale works: Go to the donation page, donate $50 and write your buy offer in the donation description free text field. At the end of the sale the highest bid will get the domain. Direct emails will not count as bids. If by the end of the sale the maximum bid will not meet my minumum requirement, all $50 donations will be refunded and the sale won't happen. Sale result and winning bidder will appear on this site. The sale will end on 20st January 2009. If the winner won't pay the bid by the 10th of February 2009, the 2nd higher bidder will be the winner. Namaste, Zibri Hint: There is a banner on the right side of this site. That banner links to a site which evaluate other sites. Bids lower than 1/3 of the "Net Worth" will be rejected. The daily ads revenue on that site is pretty accurate. And so is the daily pageview (average in the last months). Happy bidding.

If you guys are interested, hop over to ZiPhone.org and make your bid.

As for me, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Zibri for his involvement in the iPhone community. You did an amazing job and always stood for yourself, even under criticism from the other guys (psst, that's the Dev Team). Good luck to you and your family!

Daily iPhone News for 12/08/08

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated July 6, 2017

FileChute to the rescue for sending large files

FileChute from Yellow Mug Software has been kicking around for awhile, but has been pretty much under the radar for most people. Some of our readers mentioned it when we reviewed YouSendIt last January. FileChute is powerful because it can send any size file, as long as you have space on your iDisk, FTP site, or WebDAV web server.

Livespeakr now accepting pre-orders

Just to refresh our memories, the Livespeaker is a speaker cradle that holds the iPhone/iPod. The speakers are protected against RF (radio frequency) noise, so you can enjoy pristine audio without the cell signal getting in the way. The speakers will expand, rotate, and contract to fit movie/Cover Flow viewing angles, and will fit in your pocket. The speakers are powered by rechargeable batteries, or AC adapter.

First Look: Sharecard for iPhone

When you first launch the application, you are able to set the default vCard to send. When you navigate back to the vCard tab, and tap the "Send Card" button, you will have the option to send the card via email. In the email section, you can either type in a new email address, or select an email address from your contacts.

Boingo Mobile comes to the iPhone/iPod touch

Good news for travelers or anyone who is frequently on the go: Boingo has just released Boingo Mobile for the iPhone and iPod touch. Boingo Mobile is actually a pretty handy service, especially for the frequent traveler. For $7.95 a month (5.95 EUR, 3.95 GBP), you get unlimited data and VOiP access to all Boingo Mobile hotspot locations throughout the world. This includes practically every major airport, US Starbucks and McDonalds locations and an insane number of hotels.

Walmart workers back iPhone launch rumors

Newer sources back the notion that Walmart will soon begin carrying the iPhone, Bloomberg reports. The news agency cites cellphone department workers at five California Walmarts, who again say that the iPhone is due by the end of December, and that sales training for it is already in progress.

Google pushes AdWords advertising to iPhone, G1

Google is adopting a more concentrated approach to marketing on cellphones, an announcement reveals. The company says it has revised its AdWords advertising system, and will now allow advertisers to push desktop-like web ads to the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1 and other phones with full HTML support.

PocketFinder launched for iPhone 3G

Location Based Technologies has released its latest PocketFinder Location software, now in the form of an iPhone app. By using the program, a person's friends and family should be able to view the location of their iPhone worldwide, from any smartphone or computer. Included in the app are alert zones, which allow customizable alerts to be sent out whenever a user leaves a specified area.

Songbird Remote Controls Playlists from your iPhone or iPod Touch

One of the great strengths of Songbird, a jukebox app intended to serve as a more open-ended iTunes killer, is its Firefox-like extensibility. The 779Media group jumps out of the gate with a remote-control application for iPhones and iPod touch devices that, while simple in functionality, does give you basic play/pause/back/forward control from anywhere your home wireless network reaches.

Slydial: Great, if you can get it...

I found this great iPhone app last night called Slydial. It lets you leave a voicemail on someone's mobile phone without bothering the person to answer. So, the recipient will not get a ringtone but will get your voicemail message. And it's free!

Smiley Page Dots Mod

Sébastien Page ∙ December 7, 2008

There is a new mod available in Cydia that will customize the little page dots to smiley faces. You know, these dots on your springboard that tell you how many pages of applications you have, well, now you can change these dots and make them smiley faces.

This mod comes in 3 different colors: blue, pink and green (as you can see on the picture above). To download this mod, go to Cydia and install the apps called Smiley Page Dots.

To my knowledge, this is the only mod that allows you to change the page dots, but I might be wrong. If you know of any other similar mods, please let us know in the comments.

DOOM! A Great iPhone Port or hilarious pun?

Cody Lee ∙ Updated January 29, 2016

Many of us remember back to the days of Yore. When first person shooter games like Wolf 3D and Doom were taking the PC market by storm. These games completely changed the video game market and have been reproduced on nearly every gaming platform there is. It's funny to think how Doom in particular was so revolutionary for its time, and continues to be that way to this day as it makes its way onto the iPhone via always groundbreaking Cydia. Now, groundbreaking usually means stability issues, which those who have read previous articles of mine know how much I despise, but I decided to give it a run.

After a quick splash screen, I'm thrust in the middle of a dark, alien crowded room. Simple, but different on screen controls, make for easy maneuvering. At first it seems as though the game has you in continuous forward motion, then you'll notice if you tilt your phone towards you, it uses the iPhone's accelerometer to stop or move backwards. After trying to laugh off an awkwardly dumb moment, I decided it was time to kick some monster butt. Negative. It took several minutes to locate my first monster. The motion sensing seems off, and that tends to make for a frustrating time (maybe it's something you have to get used to). Combine that with an already boring and hard-to-distinguish-objects, 2D graphics, and it makes for an overall negative experience. Now ZodTTD did get a few things right. The game was actually extremely stable for an iPhone port, didn't crash on me once. And the control system is one of the better ones I've seen, with large left and right arrows placed perfectly for your thumbs.

Maybe it would be better if there was a different way you could move forwards and backwards. Maybe the actual playing screen needs to be larger with smoother graphics. Maybe old school ports like this just aren't my cup of tea. I'm sure many of our readers love this game. ZodTTD is definitely one of the most respected guys in the community, and I'm sure that Doom will continue to evolve. Is this game going to be deleted from my springboard due to low level of playability? Yes. Does that mean it's doomed? No. I will continue to watch for future updates and hopefully some things will have been revamped.

Update: I always try and make sure to cover all the bases when posting opinions on software people work really hard on. Upon submitting this article, I stumbled across a 'mouse sensitivity' setting in the 'Options' category of my Doom menu, I know, who woulda thunk it. This did improve some of my movement issues, however be cautious when tweaking your settings, as this caused my once crash-free app to well, crash. Bottom line, it still did not change my opinion of the game, but as I stated before these old school ports really aren't my bag.

DMCA Jailbreak Exemption Petition

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a law that President Clinton signed 10 years ago that pretty much says that it is illegal to produce or disseminate technology that is put in place to control access to copyrighted material.

Every three years, the office and Library of Congress ask if anyone has any suggestions for revising the DCMA. This year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is petitioning (.pdf) for the privilege of hacking smartphones, which could allow iPhone owners, for example, to legally jailbreak their iPhones.

In case you didn't know (or in case you thought you could do whatever you want with your iPhone since you paid for it), let me remind you that jailbreaking your iPhone is a violation of copyright laws, and even though it is extremely unlikely to happen, Apple could sue you for modifying your iPhone firmware. Like most of you, I wasn't really aware of that until my recent issue with Apple's lawyers...

If you feel really concerned about it, check out the petition.

Live TV On Your iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated November 25, 2016

We already know about Orb, the app that allows you to stream TV to your iPhone. Although very impressive, Orb requires some extra hardware and seems more like a pain in the ass than a truly practical application. Here comes LiveStation, an application currently being developed by UK company Skinkers and that aims at making live TV on your iPhone as easy as it should be...

In the following video, CEO Matteo Berlucchi talks about Livestation and confirms it is currently being worked on. But most interestingly, Matteo shows a demo of the app and it is astonishing! Apparently, Livestation will only work on wifi to be in total compliance with the carriers TOS but I suspect a hack to become available as soon as Livestation is available, to make it work over 3G as well.

Check out this video. Skip the first two minutes if you want to go straight to the point.

FontSwap Changes The Font of your iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ December 3, 2008

Well folks, FontSwap finally made its way to firmware 2.x and let me tell you right off the bat that it's better than ever. Custom fonts on your iPhone are the cherry on top of all your customizations and I had been waiting for that for a while.

Before updating to 2.2, I had some custom fonts on my lock screen and in my notes but to get there, I had had to manually edit some files on my iPhone, which doesn't come without risk... When I restored, updated and jailbroke my 2.2 iPhone, I really didn't want to go through the whole process again but thankfully, FontSwap is now making it easy for us to change every font on the iPhone.

So let's have a closer look at FontSwap... After installing and launching the app, you are given four different font customization options: dialer fonts, lockclock fonts, notes fonts, and system fonts.

The dialier font, like the name says, is the font of your phone dialer. You only have one font option for your dialer, and it's NeoTech, the font that I had previously installed on my iPhone.

You can also customize the font of the clock on your lock screen. To do so, simply go to LockClock Fonts and you will have the ability to choose from five different fonts, plus the default one.

Getting rid of the ugly notes app font has never been easier... Simply choose this option from the menu and you'll be able to change the notes font to either Calibri, or Notec.

Finally, you can change the system font, which is pretty much everything else on your iPhone. Changing the system fonts will change the font of your SMS and Mail apps. The System Fonts option offers the largest variety of fonts with no less than 10 fonts for you to choose from.

When you choose a font, a message will pop up giving you 3 options: install & respring iPhone; install & relaunch FontSwap; or cancel. I recommend installing and respringing every single time. That may avoid some problems.

I do have a few remarks about this great app. For one, I really would like to see Arial ported to the iPhone. Along with Helvetica, Arial is the easiest font to read, and most agreable to look at, in my opinion anyway.

Second remark is that FontSwap should give you a preview of every font, a la Photoshop, so you don't have to try every font to see if you like it or not.

Finally, there is no check mark indicating which font you're on which is kind of stupid as 2 days from now, I won't be able to remember what font is on my lock screen or in my notes. Gosh, I can't even remember now and I installed the fonts 10 minutes ago...

All in all, it's a great app if you want to push your iPhone or iPod Touch customization a notch further. I forgot to mention that this app is available for free in Cydia, which means you're iPhone has to be jailbroken. That might be reason number 1,643,894 for jailbreaking your iPhone!

Exclusive Interview With A Dev Team Member

Sébastien Page ∙ December 3, 2008

This interview was featured on AppleBlog.Blog.hu and was sent in and translated by Hungarian reader panicradio. It is extremely rare that Dev Team members give interviews, and while this is not MuscleNerd, or PlanetBeing speaking here, it's always nice to have an insight on what these guys do and how they do it. Dev Team member, if you read this, hit me up as I'd love to get an interview with you directly.

First of all congrats for the job you did so far, but I think you already know that half of the world is supporting you!

Thanks! Me and my wife read your blog, and after you wrote about the Dev Team, we thought it would be a good idea to find you. Your blog is the first hungarian language blog or newsportal we communicate to directly.

Special thanks for that. Let's start with who the members of the Dev Team (no names of course) are, and how you organize your work since you are living in different countries, continents.

Members of the Dev Team are software, electronics and cryptographics professionals from all over the world. The members of the team - or much more, the core - are from Hungary, France, Belgium, England, Russia, Israel, Ukraine and the USA. We work in a way, that we distribute our work files among us, and with team work, we put the ideas together. The average age is about 30 years old. Most of us don't know each others name and never met each other.

How many are you?

Everyone has a full time job - and of course this has influence on the Dev Team's work, but usually there are 15 active members working on the job at the same time.

How do you organize, where does the idea come from to hack the iPhone, and why did you set it up?

We are high tech enthusiasts and hackers... hackers in a good way. We like to crack things and see how they work. Most of us have worked with UNIX and OS X for a long time. Few of us knew the others from there, and other professionals have joined later, those whose work we appreciate a lot.

Do you get any threats or "feedback" from Apple? Did you have any contact with the company?

Apple never made contact with us. We make sure we never break the law when we release a new software. PwnageTool and QuickPwn are very complicated, because these softwares remove the necessary parts from Apple's firmware. We NEVER release pirated softwares.

How much time do you spend on the crack, and other iPhone-related works?

We are working on it 24 hours a day. While one of us are working on it, others are sleeping, and we continually switch. IRC is running in the background all the time, even when we are working onour private jobs, so we have worked on the iPhone thousands of hours. I have to mention, that we spend a lot of money on special hardware and reverse engineering softwares, also from our own money.

Do you get any donation, do you make any profit out of the huge work you made anyway?

We finance everything with our own money. Most of the team has a good job that pays good money in the IT field. The Dev Team is our hobby and although it is very time consuming, yet it still is a hobby. We didn't take money from anyone!

How many people cracked their iPhones with your program? Do you have any idea how much iPhone users freed their phones?

We have more than hundred thousand recurrent PwnageTool and QuickPwn users. It is hard to estimate how many exactly, but a lot.

Why it is so hard to unlock the iPhone 3G? What is the main difference between 2G and 3G that has prevented the unlock so far?

Apple and Infineon made a very serious work and made almost impossible to unlock the iPhone 3G. They learned from what we did with 2G and made the 3G much more safer.

How far are you from suceeding with the unlock?

This is secret of course.

How deep was the 2.2 baseband update? If you want to make a sim-unlock on this as well, do you have to start the job from scratch? So, if someone accidently updated the baseband, does he have to give up, or does he still have a chance to unlock his phone?

At the moment the exploits we used to run our codes on 2.1 and older basebands has been removed from 2.2. 2.2 closed the security breach we used to control the baseband as we wanted and at the moment 2.2 baseband is bad.

What do you mean "bad"?

In 2.2 baseband there is no such an exploit we can use, so it is bad :-).

What do you think about the sofware and hardware of the iPhone 3G compared to other smartphones?

The iPhone OS is very advanced technology. It is years ahead of everything you can buy on the market at the moment. And yes, I am an Apple fan, but nobody can deny that iPhone is almost futuristic. T-Mobile's G1 is the second best device after iPhone, but it is still behind 18 months at least I think.

Why do these two devices have advantage over others?

The iPhone OS is based on UNIX/Mach operating system, and both UNIX and Mach is a result of many years of developement. G1 is using Linux, which has a similar story. Fortunately nowadays mobile processors are powerful enough to use UNIX.

What kind of deficiency does the iPhone OS have, and in which direction would you develop it, if it depended on you?

It would need to be more open.

Why and for who do you do your work?

First of all for myself, for us, and for the people who prefer an unlocked phone. We bought a flat in Budapest with my wife, and the agent does not come to our home every week to check if we had painted the walls red, does he? The situation is similar with the IPhone and other devices we buy as well.

What do you do on week days?

We work and play. We have a very special Hungarian Vizsla (deerhound), he keeps us busy all the time.

Why did you choose a pineapple as your logo?

Apple/Pinapple, Pwn/Own, PwnApple (Pwning Apple)

Get Your Tickets With Tiggits!

Guest Author ∙ Updated February 15, 2018

Is the concert to your favorite musical artist sold out? Or maybe you HAVE to go to this week's NFL game but all of the tickets are gone. Well, a new app called Tiggits [iTunes link] allows to purchase those tickets right on your iPhone.

Just so that there is no misunderstanding, Tiggits is a ticket RESELLER. That means you are probably not going to get the face value of the ticket. This service is for those who are willing to pay the extra money for tickets and were either unwilling or unable to stand in line when the tickets initially went on sale.

The best way to find tickets in your area is to do a search. You can search for a city, venue or performer. I just typed in Honolulu and chose whether I wanted to see a concert, sporting event, theater event or "other." The screenshot posted is the Gloria Estefan concert at the Neal Blaisdell Center next January. The one thing I immediately noticed is that there are almost no single tickets sold. They usually come in pairs or larger. You can also browse the Top 25 events in each category and there is a "Featured" section.

The way you pay for your tickets is with a credit card. Here's a screenshot of the billing page:

Look toward the bottom of the page and you will see "Secure Page: SSL-encrypted." This is important ANY time you make a credit card purchase over the internet to make sure no one other than the merchant sees your credit card number. I, personally, cannot vouch for the security of this service as I have not used it. This review is not an endorsement of the service, but rather an overview of the app.

Tiggits also gives you a coupon code to save 5% on your ticket purchases, which is good incentive to download this app.

Before using this app, make sure you carefully read all the terms and policies. All sales are final and there is no refunds, exchanges or cancellations. However, if the event is postponed tickets will be honored for the rescheduled date.