Sébastien Page

Sebastien is the Founder and Editor in Chief of iDB. Once a BlackBerry user, Sebastien instantly fell in love with the iPhone when it was first announced in 2007. Shortly after, he decided to start sharing his knowledge of the iPhone and its nascent ecosystem, which led to the creation of this blog. Sebastien currently owns 14 iPhones, 4 iPads, a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, a MacBook Air, 2 Apple Watches, 3 Apple TVs, countless HomePods and AirTags as well as a few pairs of AirPods.

What The Duck? Here Is How To Add New Words To The iPhone Dictionary

Sébastien Page ∙ January 19, 2009

If you ever tried to type such words as "fuck", or "fucking" on your iPhone, you most likely ended up with "duck", and "ducking", if you didn't manually select the right word you wanted to type. While the iPhone is supposed to add words you typed several times to its dictionary, it doesn't work for some words (fuck being one of them).

My favorite iPhone blogger, Erica Sadun, posted a great tip about this issue over at Ars.

That database is stored in the "mobile" user directory, in /private/var/mobile/Library/Keyboard. The file is called dynamic-text.dat. It consists of a (mostly) plain text list of words that the iPhone has marked for special attention. Once a word appears in that list, the autocorrect feature updates itself and accepts those items as proper spellings. It's really convenient for jargon words and last names that are part of your normal typing but don't appear in the standard dictionary.

How to fix this? Simply go to Safari, and open a new browser (very important!). Now tap the Google search field and start typing the word you want to add to the dictionary. Tap "Google" to launch the search. Now you can close Safari and open your Notes app and type "fuck". No more "duck"! Your iPhone finally learned a bad word!

Clippy Finally Brings Copy/Paste To The iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ January 19, 2009

[digg-me]Copy/Paste is without a doubt the most wanted feature on the iPhone and I still don't understand why Apple hasn't given it to us yet... Last month, I talked about PasteBud, which was kinda bringing copy/paste to the iPhone through a combination of javascript bookmarks and web services. PasteBud definitely had its share of restrictions and it wasn't as great as I thought it would be so I gave up on it.

Now comes Clippy, a free application available in Cydia through the iSpazio repo. Let me tell you right away that, even though it's still a beta version, Clippy is the best app for copy/pasting on your iPhone so far!

How does Clippy work? After installing the application, type any text you want and simply hit the "123" button on your keyboard to show the copy/paste buttons. Tap "copy" and start selecting the text you want to copy. Tap "copy" again to end the selection. Then tap "paste" to paste this text where you want it to be.

Pretty simple, huh? It does have a few limitations though...

First, Clippy only works across the Notes, Mail, and SMS apps and that is a big issue to me. Most of the text I want to copy comes from the web and Clippy won't allow me (yet) to copy/paste snippets of text from Safari.

Second, Clippy will only let you copy one line at a time. For example, if you have a 5-line paragraph, you will only be able to copy one line from that paragraph. That is kind of an issue too because you most likely want to copy larger text areas.

Besides that, Clippy works great! Remember it is still in beta so it will most likely be improved and work for Safari and also let you copy several lines at a time.

UPDATE: Clippy got an update this morning and it now allows you to copy several lines at a time and use copy/paste anywhere you can use the keyboard (ie Maps, Twittfon, etc...). So most of my negative comments about Cippy are not valid anymore. Next step to make it the perfect copy/paste app is to allow it to copy text from Safari!

This Is My New Favorite iPhone Theme

Sébastien Page ∙ January 18, 2009

This is my new iPhone theme. I find it absolutely gorgeous! It's called Aladar and it's available through the MacCiti repo on Cydia. I tweaked it a little bit so it doesn't look exactly like the original, but it's still very close. You will need WinterBoard to activate this theme.

Do you like it?

RedSn0w Demo

Sébastien Page ∙ January 17, 2009

Dev Team member MuscleNerd showed us a demo of RedSn0w running on an iPod Touch 2G earlier today on Qik. The video reveals that RedSn0w is a patch that keeps the iPod Touch from detecting the jailbreak and stopping it from booting. Absolutely brilliant! RedSn0w is still not ready for a public release but as I said before, I am pretty sure it will be released before the end of the month.

The RedSn0w Release Is Now Imminent

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 29, 2016

If you have followed this blog and the coverage of RedSn0w, I guess you'll be interested to learn about an update the Dev Team posted on its blog about RedSn0w.

Here is the news, in the Dev Team's own words:

Update 2: A picture is worth a 1000 words but a video might be better in this day of Photoshop and fake YouTube videos. So we’re thinking of doing what we did before Christmas for yellowsn0w — show a demo of the jailbreak on Musclenerd’s Qik account (announced via his twitter account over there on the right hand side). Since Qik provides a live chatroom right next to the video, we’ll probably be in there too right after the video’s over. Note: anybody posing as any devteam member on that chat right now is faking it. We won’t be on that chat except for a very specific time that we’ll announce. (We may possibly not even do the chat since it’s so ripe for abuse).

It's still not been officially said that RedSn0w is a jailbreak for the iPod Touch 2G but such screenshot kinda gives it away... If I had to make a guess on when RedSn0w will be released, I would say "before the end of the month". But hey, I'm right only 99% of the time...

iPhone App Store Downloads Chart

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 23, 2016

As you may have heard, the App Store got over 500,000,000 (yes, that's 500 millions!) downloads since it was launched last year.

Gizmodo has a pretty funny, yet true, chart breaking down the applications that have been downloaded in the App Store.

FreeYourPhone.org Petition To Make Unlocking, Jailbreaking Exempt From DMCA

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated March 27, 2017

Jailbreakers and unlockers unite! Now is the time to get heard and do something against to make jailbreaking and unlocking legal. Yes, in case you didn't know, jailbreaking your iPhone is technically illegal. If you're like me, you're probably thinking something alon these lines: "fuck that! I paid for this phone so I should be able to do whatever I want with it". Truth is you legally can't!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation created FreeYourPhone.org in order to collect signature from people like us to appeal to the Copyright Office:

Hundreds of thousands of cellphone owners have modified their phones to connect to the network or run the software of their choosing, and many more would like to. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act poses a legal threat to phone users, even though the law was supposed to protect copyright owners and distributors of digital music and movies. This threat of litigation has driven consumers underground, stifling innovation and competition.

Now, you can support EFF's request that the Copyright Office grant an exemption to the DMCA that will protect phone users.

After submitting your electronic signature,

Steve Jobs Takes A Six Months Leave Of Absence From Apple

Sébastien Page ∙ January 14, 2009

Following his message telling he was feeling better a couple of weeks ago, it appears that Steve Jobs doesn't feel as good as he wants his stockholders to think...

Steve sent this email to Apple's employees today:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Still the same question lingering in my head... Why? Why does Steve keep pretending everything is going to be fine. Steve is dying and it is time to choose a new CEO. Apple needs a smooth CEO transition and now is your last chance, Steve. Tim Cook is obviously the top contender and most competent possible replacement.

Is Apple Becoming NOT completely Stupid About The App Store Policy?

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 23, 2016

The title of this post is a rhetorical question. The answer being quite obvious as Apple has started to approve 3rd party web browsing applications.

Within the last day, the App Store has seen the additions of at least 4 web browsers, priced from free to $2. Each browser has it's own little feature:

- Edge Browser (Free) - No navigation bars. - Incognito ($1.99) - Browse without leaving web history. - WebMate:Tabbed Browser ($0.99) - Queue up all the links you click on, then view them one by one when you're ready. - Shaking Web ($1.99) - A sophisticated algorithm to compensate for small hand shaking to allow for easier reading.

According to MacRumors:

This could open the door for mobile versions of prominent web browsers such as Opera and Firefox, though there remain other SDK restrictions that could prevent full-featured versions of those browsers from appearing. Still, Apple appears to be loosening some early restrictions they had applied to the App Store approval process.

RedSn0w Is The iPod Touch 2G Jailbreak

Sébastien Page ∙ January 14, 2009

Let me toot my own horn for a second here... As usual, I was right... RedSn0w is indeed the future iPod Touch 2G jailbreak and the Dev Team is clearly working on it as we speak. Earlier today, the Dev Team published a post on their blog titles "Thermonuclear Pop":

Well it isn’t a British Thermonuclear Device. It isn’t an episode from “The Twilight Zone” And it certainly isn’t iPhone 3G related (right now) There is one other device… It fits in your pocket.. What can it be?

If you're not convinced yet, I invite you to read some of the comments on their blog, especially this one, where MuscleNerd confirms RedSn0w is iPod Touch 2G related. Now the question is: when can we expect this ipt2g jailbreak? Only time (and the Dev Team) will tell...

JailBird, Supposedly A Replacement To WinPwn

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated November 12, 2018

A new application called JailBird is about to come out, and the developer, difrnt, already talks about it as the replacement for WinPwn.

According to difrnt:

Jailbird is meant to be a replacement for WinPwn, this means unlike Quickpwn, you will be able to generate a Custom IPSW and change your partition size! Jailbird will support all 2.0 firmwares from 2.0 - 2.2 and will be the first GUI based pwnage tool for Windows that supports FW 2.2.

It was quite unclear to me what JailBird does so I emailed difrnt and asked what device it jailbreaks or unlocks and why would I use JailBird over QuickPwn.

Here is his reply:

It will Jailbreak the iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, and the iPod Touch there is not yet support to jailbreak the iPod 2G.

Jailbird works like Pwnage-Tool just on the windows platform.

Unlike QuickPwn, Jailbird will be able to generate a custom IPSW (firmware) that when restored with iTunes will return a Jailbroken iDevice unlike quickpwn where you are required to restore the default firmware then "quickpwn it" to get a jailbroken device.

I look forward to the release of this new tool so I can try it out and see what it's worth.

iPhone Nano Rumor: My Take On It

Sébastien Page ∙ January 13, 2009

If you've read the Apple-related news within the last few days, you must have heard the latest rumor about an iPhone Nano coming out in June. The rumor also says that the iPhone Nano will be available in China first, and then will come to the US.

I predict that the iPhone Nano will be announced this year at Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference in June. I also predict that the iPhone Nano will be available in the US the month following the announcement (July).

The more I think about it, the less it makes sense that Apple would launch a product in a foreign country first, especially in China.

As usual, I would love to read your thoughts on this so please feel free to leave a comment!