Introducing the Online App Store. A Better Way to Browse iPhone Apps

by Sebastien on Aug 10, 2009

I am really excited and proud to announce a new feature of the blog: the online App Store. The online App Store is pretty much like the App Store you can find on iTunes, except it’s better, faster, and stronger.

The online App Store allows you to browse new apps, popular apps, and apps on sale at the click of a button. You can browse these apps by category, by price, by release date, and by popularity. All these features are really basic, but there are nowhere to be found in Apple’s App Store.

If you’re looking for a good deal on apps, just turn on the “Price Drop Filter” on, and you will see all the latest applications on sale for any category or price range.

Each application page gives you a detailed description of the app, a few screenshots, related applications, and a direct download link. If you feel like it, you can also leave a comment about the application.

To make it easy for you to keep up with the latest apps and deals on applications, there are many RSS feeds you can subscribe to. The two most popular feeds are the 25 newest applications and the 50 latest apps on sale.

Enough with the talking. Click here to visit the online App Store now and please leave me a comment below to tell me what you think.

 

Weekly iPhone Wrapup: New iPhone Feature, Vonage, Jailbreaking, iPromoCode

by Sebastien on Aug 9, 2009

That was a very quiet week for the blog. I am out of town for the next 3 weeks so I’ll do my best to post once in a while but you shouldn’t expect great quality articles…

New iPhone Feature Spotted

It’s a little detail but I don’t think it ever was documented. On 2.x, whenever you were connecting your iPhone to a free Internet access requiring you to agree to some TOS, you first had to open Safari and agree to the TOS from there. Now you can do that directly from inside the app that needs Internet access.

Set Up Vonage On Your iPhone

There is a way to get Vonage right on your iPhone and I’m showing you exactly how to do that.

8.43% of iPhones Are Jailbroken. Are You One of Them?

According to the report, 8.43% of iPhones are jailbroken. This number seems to have gone up since the previous week when it was only 8%.

Get iPhone Apps Promo Codes With iPromoCode

iPromoCode is a new application available in Cydia that lets you find promo codes for iPhone applications. I really like the concept of this app but unfortunately, it is very poorly implemented…

 

iPromoCode Hooks You Up With Free iPhone Apps

by Sebastien on Aug 8, 2009

iPromoCode is a new application available in Cydia that lets you find promo codes for iPhone applications. I really like the concept of this app but unfortunately, it is very poorly implemented… After launching the app, you basically have 2 options available: Refresh, and Redeem App.

“Refresh” simply refreshes the screen to display a promo code for a random app, and I think that’s the first weakness of iPromoCode. Rather than refreshing and displaying a random app, it would be much better if you could browse all promo codes available.

The second downside of this app is that you don’t know what you get. It tells you the name of the application for which you can have promo codes but you don’t have any other information about this app (no description, no screenshot, nothing, nada, zip).

The second option available to you is to redeem the app directly from your iPhone. Once again, that is poorly implemented and just didn’t work when I tried iPromoCode.

iPromoCode has a lot of potential to be a very cool application, but it’s not there yet.

 

Are You One of the 8.43%?

by Sebastien on Aug 7, 2009

I just read an interesting post on JAIB about a Pinch Media report on the percentage of jailbroken iPhones. According to the report, 8.43% of iPhones are jailbroken. This number seems to have gone up since the previous week when it was only 8%.

I don’t think these numbers are really surprising. Even though Apple really doesn’t want us to, it is giving us more and more reasons to jailbreak and finally get access to applications or features that are not allowed in the App Store.

I am really proud to say that within the last few weeks, I have directly or indirectly helped hundreds of people jailbreak their iPhones.

Check out this page for more information on how to jailbreak.

 

Undocumented Feature Spotted in iPhone OS 3.0

by Sebastien on Aug 6, 2009

One thing that makes me like an airport right away is free wifi. Although 3G speed is great on the iPhone, I still think it doesn’t compare to wifi.

As my fiancée and I were flying out of San Diego yesterday, I used my iPhone to go online to tweet, read the news and do some last minute emailing.

I know that San Diego’s airport has free wifi but I kinda forgot about it. I took my iPhone and launched the mail.app, which immediately returned the following screen asking me to agree to the TOS.

It’s a little detail but I don’t think it ever was documented. On 2.x, whenever you were connecting your iPhone to a free Internet access requiring you to agree to some TOS, you first had to open Safari and agree to the TOS from there.

Now you can do that directly from inside the app that needs Internet access.

As I said above, it’s a detail but it just makes life a little easier.

 

How to Get Vonage on Your iPhone

by Sebastien on Aug 5, 2009

I originally signed up with Vonage because it was inexpensive and it gave me unlimited calls to France (and other countries) where all my friends and family still are. As my fiance and I are planning our one-year trip around the globe, I started looking into getting Vonage on my iPhone so I can make calls from my iPhone, either over 3G or wifi, using my Vonage plan.

There are many reports showing that Vonage is currently working on an iPhone app but it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. By digging a little more, I found this article that shows you how to set up Vonage on your iphone by using your Vonage line as a SIP line.

First, you have to find out your Vonage SIP credentials. To do so, open your internet browser from your house and point it to:

https://im-config.vonagenetworks.net/config?&login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&type=1003

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD by your Vonage account username and password.

This is going to open a page with a bunch of information. The information we need is at the top of the page. You are looking for something like that:

[SIP 2.0]
ProxyUserName=iphoner
ProxyUserPassword=Y0ur1Ph0ne5ux
ProxyDomain=a.vonim.com
ProxyPort=10000

Next step is downloading an SIP client for your iPhone. I recommend using Fring as it can be downloaded for free from the App Store. If your iPhone is jailbroken, you can also download SIPhone from Cydia.

Launch Fring then sign up or login with your existing account. Go to More > Add-ons > SIP > Other.

Fill out the required fields as follow:

User ID = ProxyUserName
Password = ProxyUserPassword
Proxy = a.vonim.com:10000

Save these settings. You can now place a call from your iPhone using your Vonage account, assuming you have wifi connectivity. If your iPhone is jailbroken, download VoIPover3G from Cydia and you will also be able to use Vonage from your iPhone over 3G.

It works great but for some reason, I can’t have it place international calls. Every time I try to call France, it gives me an error message. It’s still pretty awesome that you can use your Vonage account to place calls for free over wifi and 3G.

That’s a pretty sweet hack, eh! What do you think?

 

iPhone App Giveaway: 10 Promo Codes for BindoGPS to Win

by Sebastien on Aug 4, 2009

I have 10 promo codes to give away for the BindoGPS iPhone app, compliments of developers at Infoxenter.

BindoGPS is a GPS group tracker. It tracks your own location and transmits your location to all your friends. Vice versa you also receive the locations of your friends. So you can see in real time where they are.

How to Win

You have to do 2 things to win one of the 10 promo codes:

10 winners will be randomly selected and will be notified on Twitter sometimes Thursday.

Note that this game is open to people located in the US only (sorry but that’s an App Store restriction).

Good luck

UPDATE: Contest is over. The winners are: @Rissasmom043 @KellyHanson @Sherihelmers @4JustinB @failmode @captainjy @lsdunn @revjoel @GREGENGLEBERG @Chanaynaysf.

We’ll have more of these contest soon, so stay tuned!

 

Sorry About That

by Sebastien on Aug 3, 2009

I wanted to apologize to all of you guys for the ups and downs on the site today.

Most of you won’t notice anything but if you’ve spent a few minutes on the blog and tried to browse various pages today, you probably saw the “Internal Server Error” message.

There are 2 reasons for this. For one, my host is crap. For two, I am working with an amazing developer on a BIG project for the site. Those of you who follow me on Twitter might already have seen some of it although it hasn’t been officially announced.

I have been super busy all day working with this dev to make things happen, which is why there won’t be any new article on the blog today.

On top of that, I have been notified by my ex-girlfriend that she’s going to put her cat “the Nos” to sleep. I’m going to go to the vet with her soon. Nos was my favorite cat ever and I am sure he will go to Cats Heaven ;)

I felt like sharing this info with you because I think it’s very important.

Stay tuned!

 

Weekly iPhone Wrapup: Apple’s Shenanigans, SMS Hack, 3.0.1, Jailbreak, and More…

by Sebastien on Aug 2, 2009

In case you missed some of this week’s articles, here is a wrapup of everything we blogged about.

OS 3.0.1

What’s cooking? 3.1 or 3.0.1?

I bet that it’s going to be version 3.0.1 as I think it’s still a little early for Apple to release version 3.1. But hey, I might be totally way off.

iPhone OS 3.0.1 is out

As I predicted this morning, Apple didn’t realease a 3.1 but a 3.0.1 update to the iPhone OS. The firmware update is supposed to fix the SMS vulnerability that we talked about earlier this week.

Dev Team explains the 3.0.1 jailbreak

The Dev Team posted an official update on their blog about the 3.0.1 jailbreak and unlock. I guess the aim of this post is to clarify a little bit on what to do and how it works.

Jailbreak and unlock iPhone OS 3.0.1

The Dev Team reported that it is safe to update your iPhone to OS 3.0.1. After updating your iPhone to the latest 3.0.1 firmware, you can run the latest version of RedSn0w and point it to firmware 3.0.

Apple’s Shenanigans

Enough with Apple dictatorship

A rant about how Apple is handling the App Store approval process. What really annoys me is that people don’t seem to care much and just deal with it. If it was Microsoft doing the same thing, people would be ranting all over the web. But it’s Apple, the great innovative, customer oriented company so that makes it ok… To me it doesn’t!

Apple thinks you’re a drug dealer or a criminal…

Apple has argued in a filing with the US Copyright Office that iPhone owners who jailbreak their iPhones and change the ECID can very well be drug dealers.

Random News

Cydia is kicking the App Store in the nuts

It seems that the Cydia Store is doing well as Jay Freeman aka Saurik, the creator of Cydia, reports that “the Cydia Store has had about 53,000 purchases for a grand total of about $210,000 spent“.

Apple unveils the new iPhone 3GI

A little over a month after the launch of the iPhone 3GS, Apple unveiled a newer model called the iPhone 3GI. The “I” stands for Invisible, as it is only visible to Apple’s most loyal customers.

Get AT&T Navigator (the GPS app) for free for a month

You can call AT&T at 611 and talk to a representative. Tell them you would like to try AT&T Navigator and ask them if they would mind giving you a free trial.

How to hack any iPhone in the world via SMS

If you receive a strange looking SMS on your iPhone this Thursday, you’d better turn it off right away as it might enable hackers to infect your iPhone and take control of it

 

Dev Team Explains the 3.0.1 Jailbreak & Unlock

by Sebastien on Aug 1, 2009

The Dev Team posted an official update on their blog about the 3.0.1 jailbreak and unlock. I guess the aim of this post is to clarify a little bit on what to do and how it works.

The 3.0.1 release is a “branch” from 3.0 that occurs (code-wise) before all the 3.1 betas.  The programs redsn0w needs to change for the jailbreak are identical when you compare the 3.0 and 3.0.1 versions.  It seems pretty much the only changes Apple made were for the SMS bug, which affects programs that redsn0w doesn’t touch.  That’s why you can re-use redsn0w 0.8 on 3.0.1 even though it was written for 3.0.

As I explained yesterday, you can still jailbreak your iPhone running 3.0.1 running RedSn0w and pointing it to firmware 3.0. Then, should you want to unlock, simply install UltraSn0w from Cydia if your are on an iphone 3G or 3GS. If you’re on a 2G, just use RedSn0w to jailbreak and unlock.

The Dev Team says that they will update RedSn0w at some point so it recognizes firmware 3.0.1 but it will just be “aesthetic” changes, so there is no reason to wait for it.

For more detailed information about jailbreaking and unlocking, I recommend you check out the jailbreak page and the unlock page of this site. It is updated with the latest info.

 
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