Hackszine.com: iPhone Archives

Archive: iPhone

Page 1 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 >>

October 24, 2008

iPhone NDA is dead, dev forums appear on Apple

iPhone Simulator

Great news from Adam Simon via twitter:

iPhone NDA officially dead, swanky new developer forums are available in beta: https://devforums.apple.com

via Daring Fireball, here's a writeup on the details of the NDA: Are the iPhone APIs public yet?

October 16, 2008

Sync your iPhone with multiple computers

One of those annoying "features" of iTunes is that it wants to erase your music library every time you connect it to a different computer. For those of us who move between a couple of different machines every day, this just won't do. Thankfully, iPhone hacker Andrew Grant put a nice guide together that shows you how to trick multiple iTunes installations into connecting with the same phone without bombing your tunes.

The trick is that each iTunes installation contains a unique ID that's embedded in both the "iTunes Music Library.xml" and "iTunes Library" files. The former can be edited with a text editor, the latter with a hex editor. It's as simple as copying the ID from the computer that is synced with your iPhone, and pasting that into the two files in the second computer. You want to save the second machine's old ID from the XML file, so that you can search for (and replace) that string in the binary "iTunes Library" file. Once you're done, your iPhone will function correctly on both machines.

How to sync an iPhone with two (or more) Computers [via tinyfish]

October 1, 2008

iPhone Hacks: tips & tools for unlocking the power of your iPhone and iPod Touch

iPhone Hacks Cover

What better way to celebrate the lifting of the NDA than to hack your iPhone?

iPhone Hackers David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, and Damien Stolarz have been hard at work on the upcoming iPhone Hacks. Because it's such a moving target, we decided to do an experiment with the folks at Near-Time. The authors are developing the book in a Near-Time space, which is a lot like a Wiki. It won't be long before we turn this into a print book, but with everything changing constantly, we wanted to get the information out as soon as possible.

The first chapter is available for free viewing, and we have a subscription option in case you want to subscribe to the whole book. On top of that, there's a forum where you can post your own hacks, and you can post comments at the bottom of every hack.

Collaborate. Contribute. Develop.
Join iPhone Hacks and gain advanced access to hacks, tips, and tricks to make your iPhone experience even better. You'll learn how to do things to your iPhone that would surprise even Apple engineers! Members of this community site can make comments, participate in the forums, and help author the book by submitting their own hacks. Start your 30-day free trial now!

iPhone Hacks

September 23, 2008

PhoneGap - develop native iPhone applications in HTML/Javascript

PhoneGap is one of the best projects to come out of iPhoneDevCamp II. It seems absolutely perfect for web developers who haven't yet gotten comfortable with writing iPhone applications in Objective-C:

PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve.

It is written in Objective-C and allows developers to embed their web app (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) in Webkit within a native iPhone app. We're big advocates of the Open Web and want JavaScript developers to be able to get access iPhone features such as a spring board icon, background processing, push, geo location, camera, local sqlLite and accelerometers without the burden of learning Objective-C and Cocoa.

Wrapping the WebKit library in a pre-built Cocoa shell enables two big things:

Web developers can create a native, network-aware application that can be distributed and installed on the iPhone
The javascript in these applications can access special iPhone features (Ie. location and accellerometer data) that normal web apps cannot

Here's some of the iPhone API that's exposed in Javascript by PhoneGap:

Geo Location
//request location - this triggers a subsequent method call to gotLocation(lat,lon)
getLocation();

//GAP will invoke this function once it has the location
function gotLocation(lat,lon){
   $('lat').innerHTML = "latitude: " + lat;
   $('lon').innerHTML = "longitude: " + lon;
}

Accelerometer
//You have instant access to the accellerometer data via the accelX, accelY, and accelZ variables
function updateAccel(){
   $('accel').innerHTML = "accel: " + accelX + " " + accelY + " " + accelZ;
   setTimeout(updateAccel,100);
}

Of course, this is open source. So in addition to the pre-built functionality, folks who can swing a little bit of Objective C can build on the PhoneGap codebase and provide Javascript access to other embedded features on the device.

PhoneGap [via Ajaxian]
Download PhoneGap at GitHub

September 18, 2008

The (unfortunate) iPhone Development Story

A friend of mine has been patiently waiting for weeks to get accepted into the iPhone Developer Program. Turns out, he's not the only one facing difficulties with the official development process. Mike Ash recorded his own experience in developing an application for distribution in Apple's app store, and even when you're accepted and everything goes right, the process still isn't pretty.

It makes an interesting story, I think, because unlike the sordid tale of some people's struggle to get accepted into the iPhone developer program, my personal experience was perfectly normal. (As far as I know.)

But even a perfectly normal experience with the iPhone developer program is intensely weird. Compared to the simplicity of developing and distributing a Mac app, Apple's iPhone program is extremely convoluted and strange.

My favorite step is #8 of 22:

8. Develop!
This is what I'm here for, after all. Now that all the pieces are finally in place, I can get down to writing code. (Yes, I could write code before. But I couldn't run it on the hardware that it was targeting, which made it somewhat less useful that it otherwise could be.)

As everybody knows, developing for the iPhone is a lot like developing for the Mac. Instead of Cocoa, you have Cocoa touch, which is very similar. There are significant differences as well, though, so it takes some getting used to.

In addition to the perfectly natural difficulties encountered from working on a new platform, there's also a big artificial difficulty. As any experienced developer knows, a great deal of help can be had from simply talking to other developers working on the same system. But Apple doesn't let us do that! If you'll recall, I mentioned a bunch of scary legal stuff that you had to click through to sign up with the program. Among all the other stuff, it included the &*%#ing NDA (WARNING: link contains extremely large curse words) which says that we can't talk about this stuff, with anyone, ever.

Aside from only having to pay a fee once, instead of for each application signing, this sounds about as ridiculous as developing signed applications for Symbian or Windows Mobile. Think about it... there's a large contingent that would like to see this sort of developer lock-down on desktop OSs as well.

On the bright side, it's actually a lot easier to develop apps for your own device by jailbreaking your phone and using open source tools. If you opt for the simple path, Zdziarski's iPhone Open Application Development book and the iPhone Dev Team Wiki are both good places to start.

The iPhone Development Story
iPhone Open Application Development
iPhone Dev Team

August 28, 2008

iPhone macro focus

Daniel Forsythe put together a walkthrough that shows you how to disassemble your iPhone (original or 3G) and adjust the lens for taking close-up photography. The image above is from his Flickr account, demonstrating the camera focused at about 4 inches - perfect for taking project photos. You can adjust the lens to focus anywhere from infinity (the default) to less than an inch, but you'll need to take apart your phone to adjust it. If you take a lot of close up photos of projects, notes, or bugs, now you can tweak your phone and find a setting that works well for your needs.

Close-focus your iPhone 3G [via Gadget Lab]

August 17, 2008

Use iPhone version of Google Reader on your Mac

I'm fond of iPhone-specific versions of web sites; they usually have just the minimal set of features you need and are very easy to use. Adam Darowski just posted a great way to get the iPhone version of Google Reader running on a Mac as a desktop app:

Do you find yourself checking feeds on your iPhone and thinking, "Man... I wish Google Reader looked like this on my computer, too." I have. Using Fluid.app and a bit of user agent trickery, you can make it happen...

Read all about it; thanks to Adam's instructions, you can get this going yourself in minutes. Using Fluid.app to Bring Google Reader for iPhone to your Desktop

August 15, 2008

iPhone screen capture

With the new 2.0 firmware, you can take a screen capture using an easy key combo. Just hold down the home button and press the power button briefly. If you hold it for several seconds, the phone will soft reset, but if you just press and release, you'll see the screen flash and an image will be stored in your photos folder.

This ought to come in handy if you're doing any programming, web-based or native, on the iPhone. Nothing beats having a screenshot during QA to help document problems.

August 5, 2008

iPhone SDK tutorial - simple RSS reader

The Apple Blog recently posted a simple SDK tutorial for the iPhone that walks you through the steps for creating a little RSS reader. It's pretty cool in that it's one step above a Hello World app - it performs a real world function, but doesn't get too bogged down in features and details that would detract from its usefulness as a beginner howto.

When you're done with the howto, you'll know how to create an Objective-C iPhone project in Xcode, use the NSXMLParser class, and properly allocate and deallocate memory at runtime.

iPhone SDK Tutorial: Build a Simple RSS reader
Official iPhone SDK

July 31, 2008

Buzz Kill - stopping iPhone GSM speaker noise

Every GSM cellphone user is familiar with the annoying Bzzzhtzttt noises that tend to emanate from random electronics anywhere you take your device. The iPhone is no exception, but the problem is exacerbated since most people have it sitting on their desk with a speaker close by playing music at reasonable amplification. It sucks.

Mac Life has a solution that may work for you. Just yank the ferrite beads from an old usb cable—they are inside the plastic bulge near one end of most cables—and place them around or taped in-line with your speaker cable. There are a few stories of success with this method, and nobody has mentioned an impact on audio quality, so it's a cheap fix that's worth a shot.

iPhone Buzz Kill

July 21, 2008

Tether your iPhone 3G

Your iPhone can connect you to the web from just about anywhere, but sometimes browsing on a tiny screen isn't enough. With jailbroken 3G and some free software, it's pretty easy to bring that internet-anywhere access to your laptop.

Nate True put together a howto that will guide you through the steps for configuring your iPhone 3G as a web proxy using the 3Proxy software. The laptop connects to the iPhone over an ad-hoc WiFi connection, the iPhone connects to the internet on its 3G connection, and 3Proxy sits in the middle, shuttling http requests and responses from your laptop to the world wide internets.

There are a number of steps involved if you include the whole jailbreaking process. If you get this out of the way, though, you'll be prepared to jack in in an emergency (or in a lame-o airport with pay wifi).

How to tether your iPhone 3G
3Proxy
PwnageTool 2.0.1 (for jailbreaking your iPhone 3G)

June 12, 2008

HOWTO - scrub private data from your iPhone

Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Open Application Development, has been working on a forensics toolkit for law enforcement that allows the recovery of personal data from the iPhone. Apparently, the inspiration for this came from a discovery that refurbished iPhones, straight from the Apple store, often times contained personal information on the reformatted filesystem. This includes things like photos, contacts, and even more personal information that might have been in an email.

Just as you would scrub a hard disk before selling your computer, you should take a few minutes to clean the data from your iPhone if you're thinking of getting rid of it. Performing a normal restore just recreates the filesystem without completely scrubbing the drive's data, so to really clean a device before getting rid of it, you'll need to completely write over the disk. Jonathan has an article which walks you through a few simple steps to do just that. Writing over the entire disk takes quite a bit of time, so be prepared to let it sit for a couple of hours.

Making your iPhone Safe for Resale

June 10, 2008

Free magazines for iPhone users (and fakers)

If you have an iPhone, or the handy User Agent Switcher for Firefox, there are a couple of sites that offer free digital versions of several popular magazines. I guess the idea is to try and capture email addresses, but you can cancel through the input boxes and get straight to the content fairly easily.

If you are using Firefox, you can fake your browser into reporting itself to web servers as an iPhone by downloading User Agent Switcher and adding an "iPhone" entry with the following user agent string under Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

Once you've switched to that user agent profile, most sites will think you are browsing from the iPhone platform and display the content that is targeted to that device - in this case, free magazines. The two sites that provide magazine content targeted to the iPhone are:

I should mention that there are a couple of racier magazines to be found in there, so I'll stamp this one with a potential NSFW factor. I'm sure you were going to just scroll right past and check out the Reader's Digest anyway, so it's probably not worth mentioning.

[via LifeHacker and Geek.Phatus.com]

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

Page 1 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 >>