tequila bomb

Very cool use of a springboard hack and the accelerometer (or more likely the gyroscope).

Very tempting reason to jailbreak your iPhone. It will of course speed up your battery consumption.

Just found this when downloading an update of OS X OpenGL Extensions viewer. It’s free and a very handy resource to have on any development device.

Just a quick post before I gotto bed, the iPod Nano hasn’t been “jailbroken” as some sites claim, I do not have root access over the device. I did not “install” an app. I figured out how to remove them and insert a blank space into the springboard.

What I have also done is figured out a way for the iPod to boot with modified files (eg the SpingBoard Plist), bypassing the procedure it takes to stop this, I hope this will allow us to figure out a way to jailbreak it. I am primarily focusing on exposing some of the (for now) hidden features of the device.

The hack is simple. It may lead to greater things. I just don’t want people getting their hopes up that’s it’s jailbroken just yet or what I have done to be blown out of proportion.

I’ll write up more tomorrow. Any questions, contact me on twitter: @jwhelton

I’ve emailed Steve three times asking for an iPod Nano SDK! He’s got the emails. I know he’s got the emails. But he must have been too busy to get back to me!

Consequently I am very much looking forward to more revelations from Mr. Whelton. In the meantime here’s a video…

Microsoft’s Brandon Watson reached out to the ChevronWP7 team, which recently released a Windows Phone 7 unlocking tool, and opened a line of discussion about homebrew app development. As a sign of good faith during the conversations, which could ultimately lead to some kind of homebrew support from Microsoft, ChevronWP7 has agreed to pull its unlocker tool.

Rest assured that the gloves will come off if the talks don’t pan out.

It seems odd that Microsoft would consider helping developers build apps with capabilities not allowed under Microsoft’s developer terms.

Not really odd. I touched on this some time ago.

Microsoft is a software company. They need their App Store to succeed. And they are well aware that right now they don’t have any where near the consumer numbers or the lock in juju that Apple has with the App Store.

Nor do they have the raw handset profits that Apple does; which in many ways mean that Apple could forgo having an App Store and still make money.

If Microsoft are smart they will try to embrace the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community on any terms. Unfortunately “Smart” and “Microsoft” are not often words that occupy the same sentence.

Let’s not forget that in other news Microsoft is apparently quite happy to put a 360 hacker in jail for a few years if necessary, over similar hacking activities. If the ruling on iPhone jailbreaking (and it’s legality in the US) had gone another way ChevronWP7 might have found themselves in court, rather than sitting across a table from Microsoft – albeit probably very briefly.

AirPlay Video is part of a public framework called MediaPlayer. This is the same MediaPlayer framework that developers use to show video in their applications. The current movie players ship with an AirVideo selection option built right in. The problem is that when you select AirVideo in a non-Apple application, the video continues to play on-device; only the audio is re-routed through the server to Apple TV.

That’s a big bummer, especially when applications like AirVideo and VLC are crying out for this kind of functionality.

But…

self.movieController = [[[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:CINDY_PATH]] autorelease];
[movieController setAllowsWirelessPlayback:YES];
movieController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
[self.view addSubview:movieController.view];

Yes, it still won’t be App Store safe, but it’s jailbreak friendly, works flawlessly, and suggests only a single item that Apple could move to a public API to open up this functionality to developers. What’s more, with a little screen scraping or off-screen layer manipulation and a clever use of AVFoundation, you can probably have games working out to Apple TV almost immediately.

There is more background on this in the original article at TUAW.

[H]ackers have already gained root access Windows Phone 7′s registry and file system — their methods simply aren’t yet bundled up in a nice little user-friendly package.

This is hardly news. It was inevitable.

What interests me though, is the effect this will have on Microsoft’s online store. Locking people into a curated store experience, like Apple’s App Store in iTunes, is something that I believe your Microsoft traditionalists (who are going to be the core people buying and evangelising these devices – at least initially) are not going to be so easy to convince to agree to.

Plus, with Windows Phone 7 being wide open so early into the market, it seems to me that Windows Phone 7 Cydia clones may well gain traction more quickly than Microsoft’s App Store is able to.

I think we may see Microsoft have to become a lot more draconian than Apple has ever been about App Store lock-ins. Perhaps they plan to leverage a similar system to their XBox Live subscription gaming network for their mobile phone eco-system? And perhaps they hope that will lock people in. But we already know that the gamers tastes on mobile devices are very very different to those on console networks. So I am not sure how much leverage a tie in to XBox Live is really going to gain Microsoft.

Will Microsoft dare drop the “ban-hammer” on jail-broken Windows Phones? I doubt it. But it’s fun to think about!

A year ago, the idea of being able to run Android on the iPhone was damn near laughable. Surely, no hacker was good enough to pull off that feat!

Then this happened, and our minds were blown wide open.

7 months later, the project has progressed enough that just about anyone can do it — in fact, you don’t even need a computer.

You can now install Android on your iPhone 2G or 3G via Cydia, as long as it is jail-broken (obviously) and running iOS 3.1.2+

If you want to do it manually, the old fashioned way, or the quick way via “Bootlace” and Cydia, then info on all that is all here.

So what are you waiting for? If your 2G doesn’t multi-task, or your 3G is crippled and slow, why not switch to Android.

Go for it. Experience “freedom” and “openness” on Google’s mobile OS.

Good luck with that!

UPDATE : Bootlace, the app that you install via Cydia to then be able to swap OSs and install Android, is a really solid app. I am playing with it all now on an iPhone 2G.

Recently, T-Mobile released the HTC G2, their latest Android handset, and it’s got a trick up its sleeves Apple’s iOS engineers must be dying for: a little wafer of silicon that makes the handset effectively jailbreak proof.

…

It’s too early to say if Android’s jailbreakers will find a way around this limitation, but the Dev Team would do well to pay attention anyway: this might be the next hurdle they have to deal with.

Firstly, it will be exploited.

Secondly, Apple like to sell hardware. They will always do all they can in software to maintain control. But I think it is very unlikely, in the current world we live in, that they would want to jeopardise the massive hardware sales they see in unofficial markets with a truly air-tight device.

In This Video, I Will Show How To Install Windows 95 And 3.1 On An iPad Using The Free Bochs Emulator. This Requires Jailbreak.

Appealed to the geek in me!

Almost in unison with Apple releasing iOS 4.1, iOS tinkerer pod2g announced a bootrom exploit that will allow the jailbreaking community access to the innards of the California company’s mobile operating system. The exploit will eventually facilitate the next wave of iDevice jailbreaking, and isn’t something that can be plugged with a simple software update; Apple would have to flash a new bootrom to iPhones, etc. before they leave the factory.

In an update to that piece BGR are quoting a source who is “familiar” with the exploit as saying that Apple would need “a whole new processor rev.” to patch this.

I am sceptical of that second bit. But it’s not my field. So I will keep my comments to myself.