Hackszine.com: iPhone Archives

Archive: iPhone

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April 26, 2008

iPhone LoJack - location tracking for your iPhone

Erica Sadun put together a great tool for iPhone users who'd like to keep tabs on their iPhone's location. Instead of GPS tracking, a small binary called 'findme' is used to geolocate the device based on nearby cell towers.

Combined with a simple curl shell script, a private Twitter account, and a scheduled launch daemon, your iPhone can then report its location at regular intervals, which you (or anyone you authorize) can follow using Twitter and Google Maps. You could use this to find your phone if it's lost or stolen, or you might just use it to give your friends and family a way to track your current location.

iPhone LoJack

Related posts:
Command Line Twitter
Open GPS Tracker

February 20, 2008

iPhone WebClip speed dial

Nate True figured out a quick way to add speed dial icons to your iPhone 1.1.3 home screen:

So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put icons on your home screen for websites, but I know many of us want to put phone numbers on there for a Speed Dial screen.
I've put a little hack together that lets you have a (somewhat) speedy speed dial icon. There's no jailbreaking required for this one - it can all be done using Apple-approved Web Clip creation.

The difficulty is that it's not as easy as loading a tel://[phone_number] URL in Safari and then adding a bookmark to the home screen. When you cancel the call, the URL displayed in Safari returns to the previous item in the browser's history. Nate's hack is to use a data: URI to redirect to the tel: address. When you cancel the call to add the bookmark, the browser returns to the data: address and you can bookmark that. Since it does an immediate redirect, clicking the link on your home screen will immediately trigger the call dialog.

If you wanted to type the whole thing in, you'd essentially enter something like this in the address bar (all on one line):

data:text/html,<html><head><meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0;url=tel://12345'/></head></html>

Thankfully, Nate put together a page that will do the dirty work for you and generate the appropriate data URI for bookmarking. Just point your iPhone's Safari address to http://[phonenumber].tel.qlnk.net, then cancel the call and bookmark the resulting link.

For step-by-step photo instructions and info on using a different icon for the speed dial button, just follow the link.

iPhone 1.1.3 Speed Dial on your home screen - Link

January 25, 2008

iPhone Open Application Development PDF book available

Jonathan Zdziarski and his editor, Andy Oram, just wrote in with the news that Jonathan's iPhone Open Application Development book is now available in "rough cut" form. Here are the details:

Certain technologies bring out everyone's hidden geek, and the iPhone did so instantly upon its release. Thousands of programmers want to provide applications on the iPhone. This book shows them how to achieve the spectacular effects that made the iPhone an immediate hit. The book covers both Apple's toolkit and an open, community-developed toolkit that has been widely downloaded and used. Author Jonathan Zdziarski, the developer of the first fully functional application using the open iPhone toolkit, now explains in clear language how to create applications using Objective-C and the iPhone API, which in some ways resembles Apple's desktop API and in some ways strikes new ground. After covering installation of the toolkits and some background about the operating system and Objective-C, the book offers detailed recipes and working examples for everyone's favorite iPhone feature. Graphics and audio programming, the CoreImage and CoreSurfaces interfaces for games programming, interfacing with iTunes, and the use of sensors are all covered. Any programmer, using this book, can provide applications that impress users just as much as the official iPhone utilities.

For the moment, this version of the book covers the community SDK, but when we have more information on the Apple SDK, it will be updated to cover it.

O'Reilly's Rough Cuts give you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies -- before it's published. You can buy just the PDF ($19.99) or get the PDF now and a copy of the book when it's finished ($43.99). Pick up a copy and start writing some apps for your iPhone! iPhone Open Application Development Rough Cut - Link

January 24, 2008

PocketGuitar and BeatPhone: the iPhone rocks

Download PocketGuitar and you'll be able to rock a virtual guitar or bass on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Get a friend to load up the BeatPhone drum sequencer and you can get the virtual band back together.

You've got to appreciate the $400 mp3 consumer being converted into a music creation device.

I was peeking at the source tree for PocketGuitar and the sample data is composed of normal WAV files, one for each string. You can simply replace these with your own note recordings to give your iPhone its own unique effects.

PocketGuitar: Virtual Guitar for iPhone and iPod touch - Link
BeatPhone: The beatbox for the iPhone - Link

January 19, 2008

Using the serial port on the iPhone

Collin Meyer put together a working tutorial for making use of the iPhone and iPod Touch's RX and TX lines as a standard unix serial port.

This tutorial will explain how to use the serial RX and TX lines on the Iphone as a standard UART serial port. Software on the Iphone can access the UART using the same libraries and functions as in any UNIX software.

With this, you could attach an external GPS unit to your iPhone, or even connect an Arduino and use your iPhone as a data uplink and control system for your next embedded project.

Iphone Serial Port Tutorial - [via] Link

January 5, 2008

VoIP on the iPod Touch

The Touchmods team recently released a working version of their iPod Touch VoIP app, making it possible for Touch owners to place outgoing calls on the device.

The Touch doesn't come with a built-in mic, so part of the hack involves either modifying a Walmart iVoice III mic, buying a Touchmods designed add-on, or building your own from their schematics. After that, you just need to add http://touchmods.net/rep.xml to the Installer's package source list, install the SIP-VoIP.app, configure it with a SIP account and hop on a WiFi connection.

Incoming calls are not supported yet, and as far as I can tell this isn't an open source project. Charlie Sorrel from Wired's Gadget Lab describes it as being fairly buggy at this stage, and was unable to get it to function, but we'll see how things progress after a few version updates. Anyone out there with an iTouch who wants to give this a shot and report back their findings?

VoIP For iPod Touch - [via] Link
DIY iPod Touch Mic - Link

December 20, 2007

Add hidden iPhone properties to the Settings screen

Erica Sadun is at it again with another useful iPhone hack. By updating the Preferences.app's Settings-iPhone.plist file with a tweaked version, you can enable a number of hidden options right within the Settings screen. Prior to this, you could tweak these parameters with various property list edits, but this makes it easy to customize your phone in a more user-friendly manner.

Mess with your iPhone Settings screens - Link
Replacement Settings-iPhone.plist - Link

December 14, 2007

iPhone HD video recorder

The Monster and Friends Design Studio released a beta version of an iPhone camcorder app today. The hack's author, drunknbass, was able to squeeze about 10fps out of the camera when capturing data at a 2 megapixel HD framesize.

The current beta will do this for 5 seconds, but the author alludes to a future version being able to record indefinitely long clips at a higher frame rate. This may only be achievable at the sacrifice of the huge frame size, though. I'd assume that there are some non-trivial data throughput and compression horsepower limitations that would make long recordings at high framerate and high resolution pretty difficult.

I'm hoping the next version is released with source. Hopefully, with a few heads taking a crack at optimizing things, iPhone users will get a slick guerilla video platform out of this.

iPhone Video Recording - [via] Link

October 24, 2007

iPhone "revirginizing" tool

If you bricked your iPhone by updating an unlocked device, the iPhone Elite dev team has a tool that will restore it to its inital virgin state. It will safely back up and then restore the seczone area of the phone, undoing the bug created by the inital unlock code.

RevirginizingTool - Link

October 22, 2007

iPhone OpenStreetMap

If you have a jailbreak'd iPhone, you can update the Maps.app database with tiles from OpenStreetMap. Mikel Maron figured out how to update the Maps sqlite DB and was able to import the street tiles for London.

My first idea was to modify the configuration or constant that the Maps App used for constructing Google Maps tile requests. Andrew helped with decompiling and pointers to other files, but we had no luck as yet. But looking at the app or at the GMM module in a hex editor, there appeared to be SQL inserts of tile pointers .. perhaps Maps was using a database to cache requested tiles. Searching through the filesystem found MapTiles.sqlitedb. That db has just two tables..

This is slick. You still use the built-in Maps interface, but you can add whatever you like to its database. Technically you could alter the database with any map tiles you like. One idea would be to make an alternate database file and fill it with topo-maps. Just swap the file out and you can use the Maps application when you're backpacking.

OpenStreetMap on the iPhone - Link
OpenStreetMap - Link
SQLite Tutorial - Link

October 13, 2007

HOWTO - stream music from your iPhone in Ubuntu

Listening to music on your Linux desktop doesn't mean having to duplicate all your audio onto your local harddrive. By streaming your music over WiFi from the iPhone or iPod Touch, you can keep your music portable.

Using two programs called FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) and sshfs we can mount the iPhone filesystem in Linux, then configure ssh key pairs so we can connect without needing to sudo or login as root every time we want to sync the phone, then we'll install beta versions of Libgpod and Rythmbox to end up with something insanely great.

We've talked about the sshfs FUSE filesystem before, but this is a pretty cool application for it. You're basically turning your iPhone into a wireless harddisk. Unlike a normal portable drive, you can access it from multiple machines at the same time. This allows a couple people to listen to different tunes off the same iPhone library simultaneously.

How To: Stream Music From The iPhone In Ubuntu - Link

October 10, 2007

HOWTO: iPod Touch and iPhone 1.1.1 Jailbreak

A working TIFF buffer overflow exploit was finally released for the iPhone 1.1.1 firware and the iPod Touch! This is huge for iPod Touch fans, as it means we can finally install other apps on the device. Like before, it'll probably be a few days before there is a user-friendly tool, but if you don't mind working through it, there are now working instructions available for both devices.

The first step to jailbreaking the devices is loading up a special TIFF file in Safari which remounts the storage in read-write mode. I don't want to be a fear monger, but I'm a little concerned about a couple of things here:

I haven't seen source released anywhere, so who knows what the image is doing with root access on your phone
It's completely realistic to think that a more sinister version of the TIFF exploit could eventually be peppered around the web in comments and forum postings

It'd be smart for the iPhone and iPod Touch Dev teams to release the exploit code as well as instructions to manually apply the patch for libtiff. It'd be pretty ironic (not to mention good PR) for the dev teams to beat Apple to the security update. Especially since the update requires the jailbreak process to get it installed.

Links:
iPod Touch Jailbreak Guide - Link
iPhone Dev Team announces public iPhone 1.1.1 Jailbreak - Link
iPhone v1.1.1 Jailbreak & AppTapp Installation Guide - Link

Also Worth Reading:
Heap-based buffer overflow: how the iPhone and iPod Touch could be hacked - Link

October 9, 2007

Use your iPhone as a stargazing companion

NightLight wrote in with a request for a red overlay to "use your iphone in the dark but keep your night vision." I was reminded of the hacks about using red film in Astronomy Hacks: put it over your PDA or notebook computer, and you are all set. But to try it out, I needed to find an astronomy site that works well on the iPhone. Many online planetariums use Java to do their thing, but Your Sky is a great web site that does a couple of things simply and quite well: you can punch in your latitude and longitude, and you get a view of exactly what's above you at the moment. You can tap to zoom in, and you can pan around. Just what I needed. (To save a little time, figure out your latitude and longitude on your Mac, save a bookmark for your Your Sky page in Safari, and sync your bookmarks to your iPhone so you can get to the star chart quickly.)

Read full story

October 6, 2007

Heap-based buffer overflow: how the iPhone and iPod Touch could be hacked

The recent scuttlebutt in the iPhone and iPod Touch developer forums is that there is a buffer overflow bug in the code used to load TIFF images in Safari (libtiff). The letdown is that the stack is not executable on the devices, leading many to think this is a dead end.

The heap, however, _is_ executable, and a heap based buffer overflow which exploits the libtiff bug may be the way to gain usable access to the iPod Touch and the 1.1.1 upgraded iPhone.

Read full story

September 30, 2007

Don't update your iPhone... yet.

If you've previously unlocked your iPhone, or you are considering doing it in the future, you should probably hold off updating your phone for the moment. Apple's recent 1.1.1 firmware update has been bricking hacked phones, and though there's a method for downgrading back to 1.0.2, the telephony portion of the device will remain broken (well.. until someone resolves this, hopefully soon).

Hackintosh has this quick summary:

1) If you have unlocked your phone at all, regardless of whether it's to use another sim / carrier or even just for fun and you're still using the AT&T sim, DO NOT UPDATE to 1.1.1 unless you want to render your phone useless. It will not work afterwards as things stand at the moment.

2) If you haven't unlocked your phone and you haven't jailbroken it and want to update to 1.1.1, you will not be able to jailbreak it afterwards as things stand. Until someone does Jailbreak 1.1.1, this will not change.

3) If you are still using Firmware 1.0.2, you can still synch with iTunes. If iTunes suggests you update your iPhone, just say no. In Preferences, you can turn off the setting to look for updates automatically so iTunes won't even bother asking.

4) Your 1.0.2 Phone will not just brick itself. Apple can't beam an auto bricker to your phone....You have to help them by trying to update to 1.1.1 after you've hacked it. Apple warned you, there's countless tales of woe on these forums that should serve as a warning....JUST DON"T DO IT!!!

5) If you haven't hacked your phone in anyway whatsoever and you want a cute Starbucks logo to appear everytime you're near one (as well as the other updates) then you should be fine, as long as you're aware of point 2.

As I mentioned, if you've already performed the update, you can restore the previous os firmware. None of the phone features will work, but at least you'll have your applications and WiFi connectivity back. Methods for restoring the phone's original baseband firmware, as well as an unlock method for the new firware are in the works, so my recommendation would be to just hold tight with the 1.0.2 firmware until the kinks are worked out.

Downgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 - Link
Want to update to FW 1.1.1? READ THIS FIRST! - Link

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