Madness

Friday July 31, 2009 at 10:46

That SMS iPhone Hack

By now, we’ve all heard about the iPhone SMS hack. Once again, Jailbreak users are ahead of the curve, and have a solution.

If you’re using a jailbroken iPhone then you can SSH to your iPhone, navigate to the Applications directory and then remove all permissions from MobileSMS.app. This prevents SMS application from running on the phone.

I rarely use SMS, having so many other ways of communicating with people, it’s just an overpriced waste of technology. Looks like I’m just going to disable it completely until Apple releases a fix.

Sunday May 31, 2009 at 12:20

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What Nintendo and iPhone game developers understand

I love video games. I lived in video arcades as a kid. I grew up on Space Invaders, Tron, Battlezone, Centipede and Temptest. If it was a gaming system, I had it, or had access to it. Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, C64, Intelivision, Coleco, I played them all. My only reason for wanting a computer was to play games. However, something changed. I grew up, had kids, and wasting the little bit of extra time I have playing a game that takes 5 days to complete no longer appealed to me.

This is what Nintendo and iPhone developers understand. Why does the Wii and DS/DSi out sell everyone else? Because their games aren’t designed for gamers. They are designed for real people, who have things in their lives other than gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with gamers, more power to them. Yet, there is something really nice about being able to play a game for 10 minutes and be done with it. Why do you think Wii Play, Wii sports and the Wii Party games are so popular? They are social, and each game is only a few minutes long. DS/DSi games are the same way. You can complete a level or even finish a game in a short period of time.

iPhone games are similar, with one unique difference. They can remember exactly were your game play ended. There is no boot up time, no game cartridges or discs. I play probably 45 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes worth of games a day on my iPhone, maybe even more, but it’s never in one sitting. I don’t have time for that. But I do have time for 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there.

What developers for these three systems understand is what the PSP, Playstation and XBox have missed. Most people don’t care about graphics and sounds. I can’t even remember the last time I had the sound on in a game. More importantly, if your game turns off the iPod function on my iPhone, just to hear your shitty game music, I’m probably not going to play it again. When you see a kid in a store or restaurant playing a DS, do they usually have on head phones? No, they have the sound turned off. Nintendo games don’t need sound, even for storylines. The text is shown on the screen, for this very reason. And guess what, it also means they are being forced to read, what a novel idea. Right now, I’m playing Geometry wars pretty much none stop on the DS. I stopped playing it a while back, and picked it up again a couple of weeks ago. That’s right, it’s pretty much Tempest on fucking steroids, line art and flat as hell. But, I can play 4 levels while the girls take a bath, and I’m sitting there with them while they play and splash.

As more big name companies begin to develop for the iPhone, hopefully they will remember why all those $.99 games do so well. They’re short, addictive, and just plain fun.

Sunday January 04, 2009 at 14:52

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Anais with book

Sunday January 04, 2009 at 14:51

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Ada reading

Monday December 01, 2008 at 21:33

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The iPhone Keyboard Auto-Correction

If you’re like me, and you’ve been running the BossPref Keyboard hack, then the new keyboard Auto-Correction features in firmware 2.2 don’t work. No matter what you try, enabling and disabling the autocorrect feature under settings seems to do absolutely nothing, even after uninstalling the SBSettings KB autocorrect. After a little bit of digging around in exactly what this “tweak” did, I discovered that the SBSetting KB autocorrect really didn’t “do” anything. It simply renamed the TextInput directory, so there were no dictionary files. When you uninstall the “tweak”, it also didn’t clean up after itself, failing to rename the directory. So, if you’ve been using this “tweak”, and it was auto-installed by AptBackupRestore, when setting your jailbreak iPhone back up, then you just need to rename to directory to start using the new 2.2 firmware keyboard fix. Simply rename:

/System/Library/TextInput-bak

to

/System/Library/TextInput

Reload the Springboard, and you can now use the Auto-Correction under Settings->General->Keyboard. The Apple fix to this annoying feature, offers a lot more options, allowing you to still use other keyboard tricks, without using Auto-Correction.

This is also a great time to point out that AptBackupRestore is one of the best little apts in the Jailbreak toolkit. Since Jailbreak is nothing more then deb packages, this little apt creates a text file of installed Jailbreak programs, and then with a single click of “Restore”, all your apps show back up after a firmware install.

Saturday November 22, 2008 at 14:26

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Zooming in iPhone Webclips

The ability to make Webclips (or url links on the iPhone springboard) is yet another one of the nice features of the iPhone. However, the lack of control over the icon, and the positioning of the web page upon re-launch of the page has always frustrated me. Back in August, I explained how to make custom icons for your Webclips with a Jailbreak iPhone, and how to zoom in on a image to make better icons for non-jailbreak users. The only thing I really didn’t like about the zoom option, was that whenever you re-launched the site, the webclip was zoomed into the image location. As it turns out, this is controlled in the plist file for the webclip. Jailbreak users can simply open up the plist file, with the Property List Editor, and change the scale back to 1, and the position back to 0,0. This will scale the page back to its normal size, and re-position the page back to the top left corner. It’s amazing what you can discover with the plist editor, and 10 minutes to waste on a Saturday afternoon.