Rev’s Thought Dump

So you’ve decided that the iPhone SDK was either too little, too late or both. And so you’re going to jailbreak again. Perhaps you’ve downloaded iNdependence and you’re going to give it a whirl. Well, if you’re like me the app will crash the instant it goes into recovery mode and won’t start properly while it’s attached to the system. So enjoy that restore in iTunes.

While you’re waiting for the phone to finish restoring you might poke around at other options. Maybe you’ll take a friends advice and try iPlus. After googling and digging around looking for the actual files and not just blog posts about how teh awesome it is. You’ll eventually find this download page. And you’ll download the whole package and give it a shot now that your iPhone has finished restoring to 1.1.4 and synching all your stuff.

You might freak when it says it’s just going to go ahead and jailbreak AND unlock your phone. Whoa whoa whoa… you’re already paying AT&T and people who unlock often get screwed with firmware updates. So you go back to the site and find the download that says it’s for jailbreaking ONLY.

Unzipping and looking at the jailbreak only it doesn’t seem much different but you give it a shot. Seems to go well. But… then it sits saying you’ve successfully completed the jailbreak and it’s rebooting. Only, it’s not. Just spinning away. You look at the message on the iphone screen and it says it can’t find the reboot script. Because it’s in the payload that’s not in the jailbreak only bundle. Doh!

So you force a reboot of the phone and yup, no jailbreak. By now of course you’ve found the guide that takes you through the install and you note the point that at which is says

“If you only want to jailbreak your iPhone (you have an AT&T account set up as an iPhone and you don’t want to unlock your iPhone), type ./iplus -j instead.”

So you go back into the first iPlus package you downloaded and you run iPlus with the -j option. Woot! It works! Right on.

But wait. No YouTube. I know, I know. Who cares. Well… you do because you paid for this thing and you want to use it all and then some. So you have SSH on there and Terminal and being a security minded individual you make sure to hop right into the shell and run passwd and get that default password (alpine) changed and fast.

Then you set about getting a few good apps installed. One of which is a handy tweak you found that will fix the YouTube problem. You exit the installer and reboot. WHOA.. wait.. where did all the bookmarklets on the spring board go? Why is it telling me how to move and delete icons from the spring board? Why is it rebooting?! And again? And again?! And… (You get the picture).

Well, crap. Is it a brick? No. Digging around you find that if you connect the phone to the computer and then fire it up holding the power button and the home button (not just the home button like you found earlier) that it’ll go into recovery mode and you can begin the tedious process of restoring your iphone through iTunes. Phew, your ass unpuckers.

While you’re waiting for the restore you go over what you did wrong. Perhaps that “fix” for YouTube wasn’t such a good deal after all. You vow to skip that this next go around and after getting some coffee and going to the bathroom you come back to find the restore finished. You launch iPlus again and go to put the kids down.

Coming back you’re ready to go. Drop to shell, passwd away the security problem. And you set about checking that everything is working. Hrmm well no.. the browser crashes. What gives? Well, maybe you need to reboot to kinda flush things out. Oohh ooh! Yup.. you’re in that loop again. Well, crap.

While you sit and wait for the restore (how many has that been?) you’re online with your friend who is currently running Mono on HIS jailbroken phone. And he suggests maybe ZiPhone. Hrmm okay.. why not? It’s not like you’re the type to learn your lesson. You grab it while your phone is still restoring and get ready for some command line fun. But.. it’s an .app. Okay ready to go… iPhone is restored. You run the app. You click jailbreak. And like that you’re done.

But now YouTube works… everything seems to work. You go into the installer app. Start to set things up, apparently the BSD subsystem isn’t installed by default. As it installs it warns you NOT TO CHANGE THE PASSWORD WITH PASSWD, because it’s borked and it will make your iphone reboot over and over and over…. GAH! That would’ve been nice to know! Wish someone would’ve blogged that, eh?

So, now all is good with the world. You install your apps. Though VTerm won’t install. But you can just grab that here. And you find a site that explains how to change the password if you need to and suggests installing Services so you can turn off SSH to save battery life and keep from tempting folks when you’re not using it.

Phew… well, that’s over. Good job! Now let’s see about Mono.

If, like me, your iPhone camera suddenly stops saving the pictures it’s taking then you’ll be happy to hear I’ve done all the digging and found you the answer. Find it here on the Apple support forums.

I haven’t been able to get a good answer to my question about loading data files onto the iphone for a new app. Not data files that are part of the app, mind you. But let’s say you’re working on a viewer of some sort for a particular file format – no I’m not going to mention which. How do you get those files on the iPhone?

I sent an email off to Erica Sadun. If anyone knew – out side of Apple’s secret cabal – it would be Erica. But even though I got a fast and polite response, it looks like there are no obvious methods other than to possibly hit a url and save the file to your storage space on the iPhone.

Hrmm… not everyone is going to have access to hosting to get/post file from. This seems like a less than optimal solution, to me. And it certainly seems to lessen the value of my particular application if the user has to jump through hoops to get their files on the iphone and if they also have to put up files they might not want to share with everyone.

I wonder if you can get access to email attachments. I better alternative. I’ll look into it and see what I find.

I’m looking at writing a viewer for the iPhone with the new SDK. But I’m trying to hunt down how I can get files to view on to the iPhone. Nothing is very clear there. If I can’t synch the files on to the phone, as I’m guessing I can’t, then do I have to grab the file off the web or something?

Anyone have the skinny on this?

Auto hackery

Trying out the flickr posting option. Get a load of this car that I caught outside the office.

Here’s another image grabbed from an iPhone on display at the Apple store. Check out the suspected zombie side show freak in the back ground.

So we may be broke and my knee may be blown out but we find time to stop by the Apple store and post from the iPhone.

Oh well, next month. Still need to see what new iPods apple comes up with next month, too.

I was milling around the local Apple Store the week before last and started scrolling through the photo album. It was obviously loaded with photos because everyone is standing around playing with the phone. Here’s one I found of two freaky yutes:

While I was off on the coast of Oregon trying to fend off the humming bird sized mosquitoes I thought it might be fun to make some sort of game or contest out of this. So here’s an idea…

Wander on down to the Apple store and be a terrible voyeur. Find the freakiest photo and use the iPhone to email the photo to me at with the subject “iPhone photo game” and I’ll start posting them here.

Maybe I’ll digg around while I’m packing the house up this week and find something of mediocre value and award it for the strangest. Get going!

My son is perched on my shoulders and I’m typing one handed with my thumb in landscape mode.
Moving pretty fast considering.

Can’t wait to get one!

I have to admit I don’t follow the stock market all that much. But I’ve been watching the fad of jumping all over Apple stock after hearing the guys on Mac Break Weekly speculating on where it was headed.

Here’s what I’ve seen:

The iPhone comes out: The stock crosses 130 and heads to 144

AT&T says they only activated ~146k iPhones the first weekend*: The stock falls to 134

Apple releases the Q3 earnings report that they’ve profited 818 Million: Stock soars to 150+ in after hours trading

I think the stock market flinching like that as a whole is funny. But then again.. since I don’t follow it normally perhaps this is status quo.

* Given that it took 36+ hours for AT&T to activate some iPhones their numbers most likely don’t accurately reflect sales figures for the weekend. In my opinion at least.

Update: Apparently during the Apple Earnings Conference call Apple quoted the sales figure at 270k. (See the note at 5:13pm)