Archive for September, 2008

After breaking apart iPod Touch folks from iFixIt disassembled iPod Nano:

Separately, iFixIt dissected the new iPod nano and observed that the unit's 3.2 mm wide dock connector "looks pretty big compared to the iPod" itself, making it unlikely that Apple will be able to slim down player any further without developing a new dock connector.

A particularly surprising find was that the new nano uses a real piece of curved glass, "about .7 mm thick on the edges, and 1.7 mm thick in the middle," to cover the LCD display. The glass is said to be completely separate from the player's anodized aluminum enclosure, with nothing holding it in place outside the force of the adjacent components.

The LCD itself "is actually almost exactly the same size as the 3rd Gen Nano LCD," iFixIt said, with the only difference being a resolution of 240x320 rather than 320x240.

Among the nano's internal components are a Apple-branded ARM processor manufactured by Samsung in July with on-board DRAM on-package, three other small Apple-branded chips of unknown origin, and an 8 GB Toshiba flash chip. "Unfortunately, the battery is soldered to the logic board," iFixIt said. "Replacing the Nano's battery isn't going to be easy."

via appleinsider and ifixit

The folks at iFixIt received a brand new iPod Touch, which they disassembled right away.

Both the touch's 3.5-inch LCD display as well as its Lithium-ion polymer battery are held in place with strips of double-sided tape. The WiFi antenna and circuitry, which are located at the top of the unit, are connected to the main logic board by wide orange cable that were designed to prevent external noise from interfering with the digital signals as they travel along the device, iFixIt says.

The specialty online reseller, which offers replacement parts for Macs and iPods, was particularly excited by its discovery of an unpublicized Broadcom BCM4325 Bluetooth chip within the device. The particular chipset supports BT2.1+EDR, and is necessary for the touch's built-in support of Nike+ iPod technology. It's unclear, however, whether the chip supports A2DP, which would pave the way for Apple and third-party developers to introduce stereo headphones for the player.

iFixIt also discovered brown rectangular component centered about three quarters of the way down the touch's logic board, which is suspected to be the device's speaker. Other discoveries include a 3.7 V Lithium-ion polymer battery with part number 616-0404, NAND flash memory from Micron with part number 29F64G08TAA, and an Apple-branded Samsung-manufactured ARM processor with SDRAM that's similar to the one employed by the iPhone.

via appleinsider and ifixit

Everyone who has owned a cellphone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype—a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo:

The only way Apple can fix the exploit that the iPhone Dev Team has been using to Jailbreak iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s is to fix their hardware, but it seems Apple has figured out a way to program iTunes 8 to detect and prevent the Pwnage exploit. The screenshot below from iTunes 8 using a Pwned ipsw (with an unPwned device attached) is one example.

The Dev Team reacted promptly:

“The nice thing about iTunes decisions is that we can provide you with patches to counter them. We have one such patch already for Mac iTunes 8 for iPod touch. We’ll be working out the full suite of patches for all the combinations over the next week.”

Dev Team also published two interesting screenshots:

This is a very nice and powerfull 2D graphic calculator. User can draw multiple functions in different colors.  There are function value inspection, function intersection, solve for root, min/max points.

The multi-touch interface makes it easy to move and zoom. Both portrait and landscape modes are supported.

$1.99

iTunes Link

Nice and funny. But uncensored, clip contains explicit language...

Gizmodo reports that there might be problems if you run iTunes8 on Windows Vista.

Users of both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista are reporting getting the blue screen of death (BSOD) whenever they plug in an iPod or iPhone. Downgrading back down to 7.7 appears to solve the problem. Another workaround is to perform clean install (completely uninstalling previous version of iTunes before installing iTunes 8).

Apple announced that v2.1 firmware will be delivered this Friday. Change log is:

• lots of bugs fixed
• fewer dropped call
• big battery life improvements
• no crashes with Apps - hopefully the whole app install process is better.
• backing up to iTunes is faster
• great new performance enhancements

There is nothing said about push notification service, cut/copy/paste or turn-by-turn GPS.

As always, I strongly recommend no one update until the Dev Team releases an upated pwnage.

This is a very useful advanced multi-function text editor. It is avaliable via AppStore (link), the price now is just $0.99 (was $4.99). Among the features are:

• cut/copy/paste support
• find and replace
• pastie.org support (to upload your text to a public site for others or to retrieve later on a pc)
• file sharing
• web previews for HTML
• 22 fonts avaliable for displaying documents
• hex and ASCII modes
• landscape mode support
• MS Office documents viewing support (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)
• autosave
• character, word and paragraph counts.

Official application's blog: http://brancipater.com/blog

iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have.

With iTunes 8, browse your artists and albums visually with the new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (120GB), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.

iTunes 8 and iTunes U are now accessible with VoiceOver on your Mac.

It is available via Software Update, or download it from Apple.com

Categories allows you to create folders on your desktop. This allows you to organize your desktop rather than having it be a huge mess. For example, you can have these icons for folders with all games and communication applications:

The app comes with a GUI configurator so that you do not have to edit text files. When you add an app to a category, it is removed from the springboard list so that it no longer shows up on the main desktop. When you remove the app from the category it is returned back to the springboard. Here is an example of a categories folder full of games:

Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many tools, some for Mac OS, others for Windows, different versions... Complicated. So let's summerize a little bit.

If you have iPhone 3G, you'll be able to install 3-rd party non AppStore applications (through separate applications called Cydia and Installer) and run these applications. If you have old iPhone, in addition to that you'll be able to unlock the device (use with any carrier).

There are two methods: quickpwn and custom firmware method. First one is for quikly pwning and jailbreaking  the device without restore. You should use it if you have unlocked device or an AT&T contract.

If you are Windows user:

• Go for WinPwn. The current version is 2.5.0.2 (also called 2.5 beta-2). Download here. It supports both iPhone and iPhone 3G, firmwares 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2. You can use either quickpwn or custom firmware method.
• There is a separate QuickPwn tool for Windows. The current version is RC3. Download here. Do you need it? Yes, if you want to quick pwn and you do not like WinPwn (or you had problems with it).

If you're using Mac OS:

• Go for PwnageTool. The current version is 2.0.3.1. Download here. Works with 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2 firmwares using custom-firmware method.
• There is a version of QuickPwn tool for MAC OS. The current version is 1.0.0. Download here. It works only with firmware 2.0.2. Do you need it? Yes, if you want to quick pwn.
  QuickPwn is not a replacement for PwnageTool, they are different tools and provide different features, QuickPwn is for quickly pwning a device, whereas PwnageTool is designed to custom build and tailor the ipsw production process, both tools will be actively developed in the future.

Recently a new project has been started, called XiPhone. It will be based on XPWN. So functionality similar to WinPwn and Pwnage will be present (jailbreak, unlock, etc). In addition to that developers plan to include:

• Auto downloading of stock firmware files from apple’s site (no need to hunt for it then select it)
• Wizard based modern GUI (created with .net 2.0), and Vista Style UI.
• Export of firmware settings so users can pass around an XML file which contains a configuration that works for them.
• Auto updates to the XiPhone software.
• Community based wallpapers used for Bootscreen, Restore screen and others
• Enabling / Disabling of options available based on the device you select.

Unfortunately, only Windows platform users will be able to use XiPhone.

Apple подал на патент (20080204426), который описывает технологии, потенциально используемые в MacBook Touch:

Much of the 52-page filing describes methods for accurately detecting and deciphering a plurality of simultaneous contacts on a touch screen, which sets the foundation for future tablet-based products that users can manipulate using not only more than one finger, but more than one hand.

via AppleInsider

IM+ is a very popular messanger among WindowsMobile users. Now it is avaliable for iPhone throught AppStore (link). It supports AIM/iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk and MySpaceIM. And it is FREE.