Ok, I Jailbroke my iPhone. So now what?
So last night, around midnight, I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone – the main impetus being I wanted to check out xGPS. Of course the first attempt using QuickPWN didn’t work for some reason, so I had to restore my iPhone, then try again, experiencing success sometime around 1:30 AM. Since then I have had only a little free time to poke around Cydia, the Winterboard and such, but from what I have seen, there appears to be almost as bad a ratio of “crap to gold” amongst Jailbroken apps as there is on iTunes. I’m kind of an impatient fellow, so please forgive me as I attempt to cut to the front of the line here and pull from your collective experiences in the Jailbreaking world.
Above: Surely there has got to be something cooler to do with a Jailbroken iPhone than throwing Domo behind my apps and changing my battery to orange…
Now that I have jailbroken this bad boy, what should I be doing with it? Thus far I have skimmed through a couple themes, all of them god-awful. I have discovered I can skin my battery to be anything from Zelda hearts to an Energizer battery, and I have discovered the joys of the Categories app, and now have all 9 pages worth of my apps neatly tucked away into a page and a half of folders. But what else should I be checking out? What are the actually WELL DESIGNED themes? Can I get custom SMS sounds on here? What are the killer apps that I can’t get on iTunes? Leave me your hints in the comments, and hopefully we’ll all learn something (but mainly me).
Anyone know how to program for the iPhone? I have an idea…
Hello faithful readers. Like just about everyone on the planet, I have come up with an idea for (what I feel is) an incredibly important iPhone application that I would love to see made. No, it is not another Sudoku game or tip calculator – at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I feel my app could potentially save lives.
Unfortunately, I don’t yet have my C and C++ skills up and running yet, so I am looking for a brainy reader to come to my rescue. The app in question would rely heavily on accessing information from a website and then plotting that information on a Google Maps display based on the iPhone’s current location (GPS) or Zip code (sort of like a restaurant or movie finder app, but slightly more involved).
What’s in it for you?
Not much, other than that you would be making the world a better, safer place (for iPhone users, anyway). As I envision it, this app would be given away on iTunes for free as a public service, although on the odd chance we decide to sell it, I would split any profits 65%-35% in your favor. I would handle any graphics and marketing needs the app would require, and all programming would be done by you, our most brilliant of readers.
If you are at all interested, please shoot me an e-mail and let me know your credentials, iPhone programming experience, and availability. If you personally don’t know how to program for the iPhone but know someone who does, please pass this along to them. Thanks!
-The Doc
Mo’ Apps, Mo’ Problems. Whose iPhone 2.0 migration has gone smoothly?
Filed under: Not Cool, Users Helping Users, iPhone, whining
Not mine, I’ll tell you that much.
While I love the iPhone, and the Apps, I do not love the “rickety” feeling my gen 1 iPhone has now, as if I must handle it with kid gloves or risk crashing it. Not that it matters, kid gloves or not, it crashes. And don’t get me started on those hour-long syncs…
Mo’ Apps, Mo’ Problems
At first the migration seemed to go well. I upgraded my firmware Friday morning, downloaded/bought a few apps, played some games – everything was going swell. Then sporadically, once in a while using an app, or surfing the web, the iPhone would either quit that application, kicking me back to the home screen, or reboot entirely. This only happened maybe twice on Friday, 3 or 4 times on Saturday, but by Sunday I had about 6 such scenarios, leading up to a real scare Sunday night. That was when I had my first “unrecoverable” crash. Read more
What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut combination?
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, OS X, Opinion, Rumors, Slow News Day, Users Helping Users, video
As someone who has more or less raised laziness to an art form, I am obviously a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. This afternoon, it occurred to me that my current all time favorite must be hitting the “U” key in Adobe After Effects. This simple button press (when a layer is selected) brings up all the current properties that you have applied keyframes to in a layer, and I would say it has saved me something like 2 years of “expanding layer properties” time over the course of my life – 2 years which I have subsequently wasted on Xbox, but still, 2 years.
Ahhh… good old “U”. My favorite timesaver.
Probably a close runner up to the U key is the cmnd+ctrl+shift+4 combo that allows you to take a screen capture of a region of your screen (or, with an additional “space bar” press, a window) and then copy that to your clipboard for pasting into your favorite app (in fact, I used that combo to take the above picture of my favorite combo). I use this almost daily in running Macenstein and Son of Macenstein, and it’s a great time saver.
So then I got to thinking – there must be some more insanely useful keyboard shortcuts out there that my readers find as indispensable as my trusty “U”, so why not find out what they are, and help spread some knowledge. So, tell us, what are your favorite keyboard shortcuts? What do you use on a daily basis for time saving/ impressing your friends in either OS X or a specific application? (I’ll thank you all to leave out good ‘ol “command Z” and the classic tag team of “command C” and “command V” for copy and paste). Let us know in the comments.
Attention Boston! Ellen Feiss needs a job
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Celebrity Mac Chick, Users Helping Users
My my, where does the time go? It seems like only 2002 that a 14-year old Ellen Feiss launched Apple’s historic “Switch” ad campaign, and now she’s a soon-to-be college graduate, looking for a job!
When interviewing Ellen about her immortalization in song, it came up that she was graduating college and looking for a job in the Boston area. I of course pointed out that a certain brand new gigantic Apple Store might be hiring (after all, I have a feeling Ellen would quickly become their top salesperson, if not draw simply to have people autograph their MacBooks), but Ellen apparently has higher aspirations (as if there could be anything nobler than selling Apple products).
“I’m interested in something in the arts, new media or film sector,” says Ellen, “but anything (appropriate) is welcome for consideration.”
Not that we want to turn Macenstein into Craigslist (well, aside from the insanely successful aspect of it) but we’re always happy to help out icons of the Mac community when possible. So attention Boston-area Macenstein readers. If you or someone you know is hiring, drop Ellen a line at hireellen08@gmail.com, and please, keep the stalking down to a minimum.
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