May 2012
2 posts
iOS 5 Status
Here’s the status of all my stuff on iOS 5 (all versions: iOS 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.1 and 5.1.1). If you haven’t heard of any of these before and want to check them out: search in Cydia, they’ll all show up. Feel free to send me a support email from Cydia if you have any issues or questions, for paid products I try and respond within a few hours if I’m not sleeping.
I’m...
HTC One X
Since it was released on AT&T this weekend, I was able to try it out at a store today. I only played with it for a few minutes, but here’s what I thought:
It’s smaller than you think. Definitely still a big phone, but it’s thin, and doesn’t feel huge (like the Galaxy Note).
The screen is great. It doesn’t have the awful PenTile that Samsung still ruins their...
March 2012
2 posts
How to test your app on older iOS releases
In this week’s Build and Analyze, Marco Arment talks about supporting older iOS versions in Instapaper. As he says, being able to test your app on those versions is not easy, and just getting a device to run a specific iOS release can need “hacky jailbreak tools” or can even be impossible. Since I spend my time with those (admittedly hacky and confusing) tools and have an...
Page Turning
This is how you turn the page of a book:
This is how Apple’s iBooks turns the pages of a book:
This is not how you turn the page of a book:
This is how Google Boo— oops, sorry, Google Play Books — turns the pages of a book:
This is a good example of how Google manages to only make it around 70% of the way to a good UI. They often get the basic idea right, but the...
February 2012
1 post
Ski Trip to iOS 3.1.2
Last weekend, I went skiing at Northstar — the codename of iOS 3.1. (Each iOS release is codenamed after a ski resort, usually in Tahoe or Colorado.) I don’t have anything to match comex’s awesome PDF slope slope from JailbreakMe 3.0, but it wasn’t all bad:
SpringBoard was there, right near the top of the mountain. Also, there was a new lodge this year, to go with one of my...
December 2011
4 posts
Spire Proxy "FAQ"
Spire needs a proxy!? It’s useless!
As has been noted, my recently released tweak Spire requires a proxy and data from an iPhone 4S to operate. As the point of Spire is to get Siri on devices that aren’t the iPhone 4S, this might at first seem to imply that Spire is useless.
However, this is not because I hate you or because I’m lazy, it’s because Apple has made it...
Introducing Spire
Spire is my (along with Ryan Petrich) new tool for installing Siri on previously unsupported, but jailbroken, devices. Spire is a small download, but while installing it will download Siri itself (directly from Apple). Spire is available in Cydia right now — go get it! This will use about 100 MB of data, so please connect to Wi-Fi before installing.
However, Spire is not a complete...
Siri Authentication
Siri may be specific to the iPhone 4S, but very little of the actual processing takes place on the iPhone. Rather, Siri streams the voice data to Apple, and then displays the response from Apple and renders it. So, to even simply transcribe your voice into text, Siri needs to be able to contact Apple.
Siri requires authentication to connect to Apple. This is likely to prevent unauthorized use:...
ICS Paper Cuts →
This week, I bought myself a Galaxy Nexus (GSM version, not Verizon, so I can use it on my AT&T contract). I actually generally like the phone and Android 4.0 — shocking, I know — but there are dozens of the “little things” that Google got wrong. I hope this is just growing pains of a completely new design for the software, but in the spirit of Mozilla’s paper cut UI and UX...
Carrier IQ is on iOS
Carrier IQ, the now infamous “rootkit” or “keylogger”, is not just for Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, and even webOS. In fact, up through and including iOS 5, Apple has included a copy of Carrier IQ on the iPhone. However, it does appears to be disabled along with diagnostics enabled on iOS 5; older versions may send back information in more cases. Because of that, if you...
November 2011
2 posts
Why not Siri for iPhone 4, iPod touch right now?
As @stroughtonsmith and I demonstrated a few days ago, it is possible to run Siri on iPhone 4 and iPod touch. However, as we are currently unable to distribute the port or the procedure we used, I think I should at least explain the reasons why that isn’t happening.
For a little background information, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of how copyright law works. Apple...
July 2011
1 post
Blocks for Target/Action?
Blocks are an awesome extension to C. And, since iOS 4 (the first version that supported blocks) now has enough adoption to make it safe to be minimum version that I support, I’ve been checking out blocks quite a bit to see where they could make blocks easier.
Some of the UIKit and Foundation APIs have been updated to use blocks, but many of them are still using the older target/action...
May 2011
1 post
Sliding UITableView Header Views
The “dickbar” (as Gruber puts it) may be the big news item lately, from my “Twizzler” to remove it to the various websites springing up about it. But, this post is about something much more mundane and technical in Twitter for iPhone: sliding headers for UITableView.
When you first open Twitter for iPhone, you get this screen. Looks like just a standard UITableView and a...
October 2010
1 post
Moving to Micro USB?
Today, some people began receiving the first of the new, streaming-only, Apple TV. Engadget has a nice review of the device itself here, but the most interesting thing for me was in the ports on the back. It wasn’t the HDMI output, or the Ethernet jack, but the small, unlabeled Micro USB port.
No iOS device, until this one, has had a Micro USB port, especially not one used for restoring (or...
August 2010
2 posts
iOS 4 Status
None of my apps so far run on the new iOS 4. This is because my iPhone 4 and my iPod touch 3G just don’t have an available jailbreak running iOS 4, not because I have abandoned my applications.
Once a jailbreak is released, I will work to quickly update Infinidock and Infiniboard. These are my paid apps, and I will support them at least through iOS 4.1, and likely longer. Preliminary...
A Blog!
I’ve never managed to keep a blog going beyond just a few posts before. I always have these great ideas for blog posts, and I’m sure they would be great, but I no longer have the inspiration when I’m just sitting at a computer. Maybe I’d just rather be coding, not sure.
But I’ve decided that for the iPhone scene, I want another blog. I can’t promise that I’ll do any better than I’ve done in the...