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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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)

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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.

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Unlocking The iPhone… The Vietnamese Way

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated March 18, 2019

So you think unlocking your iPhone using PwnageTool was a pain in the ass? Think again! Hardware unlock is not for the faint of heart as Crave blogger Dong Ngo was able to verify during his trip to Vietnam.

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone's motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh's turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

As a last step, the technician put the phone back together, and it looked like nothing had been done to it.

It will cost you $80 to get your iPhone unlocked by them, which is a little fortune over there in Vietnam.

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The Simpsons Make Fun of Apple

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated May 11, 2018

Have you guys watched the Simpsons last night? If not, you missed out on some fun. The episode opened with a brilliant, prolonged visit to the Mapple store. The epic announcement from Steve Mobs, Mapple's founder and Chief Imaginative Officer is painfully spot on which makes it hysterical. "He's a genius!", He's like a God who knows what we want!", proclaimed two obvious Mapple fanboys standing close by.

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Your MobileMe Trial Is Over Soon…

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 29, 2016

This is just a friendly reminder that your MobileMe trial might be over soon. If like me you were one of the first people in the US to sign up for this service, then you should receive an email from Apple soon saying that you will automatically be charged $95 sometimes in December (December 8th, in my case).

Now I'd be curious to know what you guys think of MobileMe. I personally think it's a waste of money: $95 for storage and fake push email seems way too much when you know you can have all the same services for free somewhere else... not including the cool @me.com extension though....

You might have a different opinion and I'd love to hear it, so please share your experience in the comments.

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The iPhone will get Flash…

Guest Author ∙ Updated January 23, 2016

Flash needs to be on the iPhone. Adobe knows it, Apple knows it, we know it. Due to Flash's many integrations on the Internet from advertisements to games and even full blown web sites, people are craving this functionality on their iPhone everywhere and a quick search on Twitter shows you what I am talking about. Not to mention it flys in the face of Apple's own statements that Mobile Safari browses "the true web" as it most certainly does not without Flash, Java and Active-X support.

The Good News, Flash streaming video is close ...

Streaming flash video for example can be interpreted by iMobile Cinema but it is only available for 1.x version firmware at the moment. According to the website the 2.x firmware version is in the works. Can't wait for this to be a reality as it is the main reason I want flash to perform on my phone.

Many sites are also offering iPhone friendly video now as they realize the political lockout of the Flash player may take a while to get resolved.

The Bad News, Wired says it will never happen ...

If you read the doom and gloom article over at Wired you may agree with them and give up hope.

Personally, I think they are dead wrong because hackers or 3rd party developers will address the solution if Apple does not. My prediction is that a jailbreak version of the Flash player shows up mid-next year at the latest. Can't wait.

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