iPhone World

A few days ago I posted about Google Latitude. After having a while longer to play with it, I’ve determined that the fact that it is a web app is pretty much a deal breaker. Even on a 3GS with Backgrounder, it just won’t do. Folks who frequently use the Safari download toggle for SB Settings will have to re-start Latitude after each toggle as well. Not to mention the battery drain. Even if you do keep Safari running in the background (or foreground), does it even function if Latitude is not the active page?

So, enough with Latitude, at least for now. I’ve begun using an app called Navizon. It is available from Cydia for both OS2 and OS3. If it does not show up when you search, add the Navizon repo (http://cydia.navizon.com/) (or xsellize). The two main differences between Navizon and Latitude, are Navizon is a real app, and it does run in the background. Along with that it updates the location every 10 minutes, so it’s not hard on the battery, and can be turned off at any time.

One thing that would be nice is the ability to change the update interval, but maybe that will come with the next version. When active there will be a GPS crosshair icon in the status bar.

Tapping the GPS icon at the bottom left will show your current position. Tapping the buddy icon will show an overview of all of your buddies. The zoom level for buddy view is anything but intelligent. You can quickly pan and zoom on your own though.

The buddies button at the upper right will show everyone on your buddy list along with their status, last update time, and method of location.

Locations can be reported based on Phone (cell tower), Wi-Fi, or GPS.

Tapping the name of a friend in the buddies view will zoom to that person’s last known location.

Tapping the arrow next to a buddy will allow you to quickly get directions to or from their location, show them in the maps app, or email their location.

Along with everything in the app, there is also a website that you can use to view the location of your buddies using Google maps. For a fee of $10 (one time) you can also have historical locations stored, for yourself only, that you can view on the website.

On the site you can set up alerts. You can either have an email sent or a user defined URL called when a selected buddy enters or exits an area you designate. Keep in mind though, that you might want to make the radius of the alert area larger than you would think. Because the background service updates every 10 minutes, if the area is too small the person could enter and exit between updates and no alert would be triggered. Without the $10 fee I believe you can have 5 alerts per month.

As an added bonus, if you are planning a trip, you can use the ‘My Coverage’ section to view the locations of previously mapped cell towers. Wi-Fi Access Point and cell tower locations are all ‘provided’ by other users running Navizon on GPS enabled phones. As you drive, walk, etc, if Navizon finds an AP or cell tower, and has a GPS location, it will report back to their servers and make those AP’s/towers able to be used as locators for those without GPS enabled phones running Navizon. As you locate and report (all automated) new APs and towers, you receive reward credits.

• Wi-Fi Access Points discovered by you / already mapped: 3 points / 1 point
• Cell towers discovered by you / already mapped: 15 points / 2 points

If you rack up 10,000 points, you can redeem a reward of $10 via PayPal. Free users can redeem only one reward, coincidentally the same amount as becoming a paid member. If you live in an area with few access points mapped, take a slow cruise or a walk around your neighborhood with the Navizon app running to get some easy points, or look for areas with few or no cell towers mapped. In 3 days of just background use, I have gotten 67 points.

The website at times does not like to cooperate though. When trying to view coverage for a large area it can take quite a while for it to load. Setting your home area and alert areas can sometimes take a few attempts to get the bounds where you want them.

Overall, Navizon definitely beats out Google Latitude, at least for now.

The good news, you’ve already read it up there in the title. The bad news, it’s a web app. Apparently it was decided between Google and Apple that a standalone application would be confused with the standard Maps app. (Read: Apple said no).

Seeing as Safari tends to stay running anyhow, using backgrounder (jailbroken users only) with this shouldn’t be too much of an issue even for 3G owners. Perhaps even using a lightweight alternate browser app solely for Latitude with backgrounder. I haven’t explored much in the browser area so I can’t make any recommendations at this point.

Accessing Latitude is the same as signing into any other Google account. Once a friend is added a request will be emailed to them. They can then choose to accept and share their location, accept and hide their location, or deny. Once accepted, you must use an iGoogle gadget to view the sharers location.

Some folks have no idea what I’m talking about so let me explain. Google Latitude basically lets you  share your location with whoever you like so long as they have a Google account. On the iPhone side of things, you can choose if and how you want to share your location.

Choosing the middle option shown on the right, you can select wherever you’d like your location to appear as.

So far I’m not sure how refreshing works on the PC side of things. After manually setting the location I waited a few minutes and nothing changed. I refreshed the page and then the new location was shown.

Head over to http://google.com/latitude on your iPhone to check it out.

There are also plugins for Latitude. One allows you to publish your location to your blog or website. The other will show your location in Google Talk, currently listed as beta. For the website one, you can choose to share your actual location or just the city. To check either of those out visit the Do More with Google Latitude page.

Hopefully Google will release an API for using Latitude and somebody will create a daemon for running it in the background.

Has this happened to anyone? You’ve got headphones or external speakers plugged into the headphone jack with nothing playing, and when you unplug them, music starts playing on the built in speaker?

I have run into this several times. Upon trying to search for a cause/solution, I found that I am hardly alone with this issue. I have a theory and need your help to confirm it. I do not have the special Apple audio cable/adapter, I simply use regular headphones or a car tape adapter with it. I believe the problem may only occur when the headphone jack is being used WITHOUT a crApple proprietary audio adapter. I have had this problem since 2.x so I do not believe it is a software bug.

While it continues to happen, I have not been able to reliably reproduce it at will.

Has this happened to you? Are you using an Apple audio cable/adapter, or something with a standard headphone plug? Found a solution?

Go

SOLVED

I purchased an Apple audio adapter (ebay of course) and have confirmed the cause of this issue. The Apple adapter has one extra contact on the plug. There is also a button that, depending on how many times is pressed or how long is held, will perform certain actions such as voice command, starting / stopping music, skipping tracks, etc.

The second I discovered that 1 short push of the button toggles music playback, it was pretty obvious what’s going on. A standard headphone plug (non-Apple) will have 3 total contacts (left, right, ground). The one that is furthest from the tip is split in 2 on the Apple adapter. I believe the button on the Apple adapter crosses these contacts to perform the user actions.  So basically, what it comes down to, is when you insert or remove a standard headphone plug, because the contact is so long, it bridges the contacts inside your phone and completes the same circuit the little button would, causing the music playback to toggle.

So if you are having this issue, your options are either to live with it, or fork over a few bucks for the adapter. DO NOT BUY IT FROM APPLE unless getting ripped off makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Go look on EBay, I got mine for less than $2.

(Just because some people will need this to be said, this goes for any cables you might need. A $40 cable from Apple (of whatever variety) can be found on EBay for 1/10 that price.

A few days ago I posted about Tapulous and the potential to have your associated Facebook / Twitter accounts hacked. There is another potential problem here. Let’s say you sell your phone. The UDID has not changed, so whoever you sell it to, if they install an app that you used that identifies you only by UDID, you’ve just given them access to your “account”. Now, it is possible to change the UDID (jailbroken users only), but it appears Apple may use this for verifying warranty coverage so if you change the UDID of a phone still under warranty and then sell it, the buyer may not be able to use the warranty. Likewise, it may be possible to change the UDID of a phone that is no longer under warranty, to one that is in order to have it serviced.

What I would recommend, is if you are going to sell your phone, email the contact for any apps you use that store settings on a server but don’t require a login, and ask them to remove your UDID from their system, or change it to your new one.

To see your UDID, just hold shift and click the serial number in iTunes.

What does this have to do with Push? Not much. In fact Push notifications are not sent based on UDID. They are sent based on a device token that is generated.

There is an issue that has cropped up that some people have stopped receiving push notifications. Apple has confirmed that in certain cases, your token can change when you sync with iTunes. When this happens, you will no longer receive any Push notifications. Their solution is to simply launch any apps that use Push and they will update the token.

Has anyone run into this? Has opening the app once resolved it for you?

Well folks, we’re up to 0.9.3 Beta. This time I’ve managed to get in a bit more testing before releasing to the wild and I think I have all of the issues to date licked here. The problem with the threshold notifications came down to a rounding error. You may have also noticed that no matter if monitor at launch was checked or not, it did not how you say, monitor at launch. This has also been fixed. I did not add any features in this as I just wanted to get all of the quirks worked out of the existing features first. So as long as nothing big pops up here, I should be able to start adding things shortly. So, if there’s anything you want µGrowl to do, now would be a good time to make yourself heard.

*Update* Shortly after posting the new release, I noticed one fatal flaw. The checkbox for monitoring was indeed checked at startup if it was supposed to be, however the monitoring was not actually started! Only a few people downloaded it during that window so to you, please update again and I apologize. Along with that, I had already began working on the next version so you get a little added benefit here. There is now a differentiation between changing from Downloading to Seeding and Seeding to Finished, though both are covered under the ‘Finished’ option.

Currently in the works

• More informative notifications. For example, threshold notices are nice, but  wouldn’t it be better to know how much is left?
• Some kind of summary on a user defined interval. (X active, X total, X seeding, total bandwidth, etc)
• An option to consider a transition from Downloading to Seeding to be a finished torrent.
• Alternate delivery methods for those who do not use Growl. Perhaps via email? If you could benefit from µGrowl if it supported another notification method, please post in the comments or forums.

Enough of the small talk, on with the goods!

Head over to the µGrowl page to grab the latest version.

I myself have not run into this, but there have been a lot of other users reporting problems with their Visual Voicemail not notifying them of new messages. It’s not clear yet if this is an issue exclusive to jailbroken or IPCC hacked iPhones, or if it is an issue with the service in general. Either way, if you have stopped receiving Visual Voicemails, give these steps a try.

• Open the Settings app
• Select General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.
• After resetting reboot your phone if it does not automatically.

There is also another method I have seen that isn’t quite as convenient:

• Open the Phone app and go to the dial pad
• Hold 1 until it dials your voicemail
• Check your messages
• Call your line from another phone and leave a message.

If neither of these solve the problem you should probably call AT&T about it, especially if you are using a non-jailbroken phone.

If one of these DO solve the problem, please post it in the comments along with whether you are jailbroken or have applied the IPCC hack.

*EDIT* 6/15/09 – This post seems to be getting another rush of visitors since the 3.1 release. I have seen the IPCC hack has been updated as well, is this issue occurring all over again in 3.1 for you guys?

First of all, Cydia is awesome, no question about that. But if you have anything but a 3GS, it can be painfully slow to load and that can be a deterrent for keeping things updated. Let’s have a look at a much faster way. Enter Apt.

You will need SSH enabled on your iPhone/iTouch to begin with. If you do not, you must install OpenSSH from Cydia and probably the SSH Toggle for SBSettings. Also you’ll need to install Apt from Cydia. Look for ‘Apt 0.7 Strict’.

Now go ahead and SSH into your device. Be aware that you cannot use the apt tools while Cydia is running. The commands you will use the most frequently are as follows:

• apt-get update
  • Updates the repositories. Equivalent to refreshing in Cydia.
• apt-get upgrade
  • Installs any updates available.
• apt-cache search <search string>
  • Search the repositories
• apt-get install <packagename>
  • Install a package. If there are dependencies, you will be prompted to continue.
• apt-get remove <packagename>
  • Uninstall a package
• dpkg –l
  • Lists all installed packages
• respring
  • Respring your device from the command line

A couple of things to note is that for install and remove, you can list multiple packages separated by a space. When searching, the beginning of each line is the package name. Sometimes it will be a single word, though usually it will follow the patter com.companyname.appname. 

Even if you only ever plan on using Cydia for managing your packages, I would highly recommend installing Apt (along with syslog). Ever installed something that really screwed your phone? Ever been stuck in a reboot or respring loop? I know I have, and it’s no fun. What option do you have other than restoring? Well, if you’ve got Apt at your disposal you can connect via SSH and remove the offending package if you know what it is. Otherwise you can do the old ‘tail –f /var/log/syslog’ and watch for clues as to the which app is responsible.

Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, there is no difference in using apt vs Cydia other than having to manually respring or reboot as Cydia is able to detect which if either is necessary.

Just a quick note here to say that µGrowl finally has a proper page here at iPhone World. News and updates will still be posted but the µGrowl page will serve as the main collection of cumulative information as it evolves.

You can always find µGrowl by the link at the top of the page or in the menu at the right.

Click here to go there now.

Thanks to Tristin (and *only* Tristin), a number of bugs have been found and eliminated. There was a serious issue with the threshold notifications. Those should all be working now.

Now, there are a few hundred of you folks out there that have downloaded uGrowl. There are (were?) some big bugs in it. Only one person has reported anything so far and is the main reason these updates are coming so quickly for the rest of you. I put this in every post, and I’m going to say it again, if you run into problems or find any bugs, please post it either here in the comments or (preferably) in the forum which is on the menu on the right. uTorrent support among the most requested and you guys are only hurting yourselves by not posting about bugs. As you can see, if you speak up, things get fixed rather quickly.

On another note, if you find that you do like uGrowl and it’s working well for you, feel free to post in the comments as well!

With that said, download away! (Check back often for updates at least while it’s still in beta)

uGrowl 0.9.2 Beta 

Click here to go to the official µGrowl page

uGrowl 0.9.1 Beta is out. Nothing too major so far. I’ve added a threshold notification. For example you can be notified whenever a torrent passes a certain percentage complete. Also added some error checking when the ini is read that may be causing problems with uGrowl registering itself with Growl.

There has been one report of the settings not being saved, if anyone else has run into this please post it in the forums, along with any other issues or requests and I’ll try to knock them out as soon as I can.

Also fixed was the server settings were displaying behind the notification options.  Only one person reported this so I’m at a bit of a loss as to if it’s even happening for others and if not, why not, but nonetheless, this release should fix that up as well.

I also switched from using Windows Installer to NSIS to make updates a lot easier. I would recommend that you uninstall the current version before installing this one. Going forward that should no longer be necessary.

Last, the version #’s were not consistent in the last release. It was supposed to be 0.9 Beta but in some places (the main window title!!) was labeled as 0.2.

As always, if anything is not working quite right, you see any errors displayed, have a suggestion or request, PLEASE make yourself heard in the forum! If you don’t speak up I can’t help you.

Download uGrowl 0.9.1 Beta

I’m trying to get an official page for uGrowl created here to make it easier for folks to track its progress and updates, so hold tight and that will be coming soon.

A number of “exploits” have surfaced for the iPhone over the last few months, but this is one I would consider of significantly higher risk than say, being remote controlled via SMS. It seems Tapulous (Makes of Tap Tap Revenge, Twinkle, Friendbook, etc), uses UDID’s for authentication, and only UDID’s. What’s a UDID? Well, it’s a Unique Device Identifier. As the name suggest, it is unique to your device, or at least in theory. There is a tool available via Cydia (Anyone who has installed Installous has this tool) that will allow a user to change their UDID. What this means is that anyone who may happen to get ahold of your UDID can potentially change their device to match yours, and effectively gain access to your Tapulous account. If you have it set up with Twitter, Facebook, etc, your accounts have just been compromised.

How would someone get your UDID? It’s actually easier than it sounds. Cydia sends the UDID when communicating with the repo’s. As such someone could easily setup or modify a repo to collect this information. Going a step further, I imagine it will only be a matter of time (if such a thing has not already happened silently) until apps show up in Cydia that appear legitimate but would for example, send your UDID elsewhere when executed. There may be countless other ways of obtaining the UDID that haven’t been thought of yet.

Tapulous is aware of the issue and are working to resolve it, which will likely entail changes to the authentication in all of their apps. My advice at this time, if you have a Tapulous account, cancel it or change your Twitter/Facebook passwords until the issue is resolved.

Now, if you are a Tapulous user but do not have Twinkle or Friendbook, the worst that could happen is someone may mess with your Tap Tap Revenge scores, if those are even stored, I have not played it personally.

It doesn’t appear that Tapulous is publicly acknowledging this vulnerability, (I can’t bring myself to call this an exploit as it is a failure in the design of the authentication system, or lack thereof), but you may want to watch their blog for more news or keep an eye out for updates in the AppStore.

It seems that the 3.1b2 breaks the custom ipcc that allows tethering and mms to be enabled. More information as it becomes available. Steer clear for now if you use that.

*EDIT*
There is a newer version available, please visit this post for details.
*EDIT*

I recently discovered the Prowl app, and thus, Growl for Windows. While I really have no need for the notifications on my desktop, they are quite nice on my iPhone. There are a few plugins and such for various apps to use with Growl, but nothing for uTorrent, which is also one of the most requested. Or is there…

Keep in mind this is still beta, and includes only the notifications shown in the first screen shot. The only known bug is that when a new torrent is added, the status is something I have not yet mapped, mostly because I haven’t been able to catch what it is before it starts. This will show up as 194 when you get a Torrent Added notification. The app does support auto-start at launch, but does not have a setting to run at startup so you would have to put it in your startup folder manually if you want that.

In order to use this you must have the web interface enabled in uTorrent, as well as Growl installed on your PC,  and Prowl installed on your iPhone

Click here to download uGrowl Setup [Link removed]
(This has been updated, please visit this post for the latest version)

Please use the forum to sumbit any bugs or requests for uGrowl.

**EDIT**
This is really 2 topics in one post
#1: Using 10.5.7 with VMWare
#2: Using the 3.0 SDK without a $99 license
**EDIT**

Develop on Windows – VMWare

It’s here folks! After trying 57 different ways using way too many different disk images, method, etc, I *FINALLY* have the 3.0 SDK installed in 10.5.7 inside VMware, and able to build for the device without having that damn $99 certificate. This is a bit of a hot topic right now as people are trying to make the move to 3.0 but crApple decided to shun an entire platform of developers, so to them I say THPTPTPTPTPTPTPT! Here’s the steps to get this for yourself:

Download this torrent

After a few reports that the torrent is dead I have decided to provide an alternate means to download the VM. These are the same files from the torrent.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

*Edit* If when you boot the VM, it hangs on the gray boot screen, download this darwin.iso and mount it at boot time. It will automatically un-mount itself during the boot so don’t worry about that.

I am using VMWare Workstation 6.5.2 for all of this, it may or may not work in previous versions. The VM is already pre-installed in this torrent, along with the 3.0 SDK.

Use the 3.0 SDK without a $99 certificate

To enable it to build for the device simply create a self signed certificate using these steps. Be sure to name the certificate ‘iPhone Developer’. Follow the guide on that link from just above the first screen shot, to just before it starts talking about plist files.

Next, you need to edit /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.0.sdk/SDKSettings.plist and change CODE_SIGNING_REQUIRED from YES to NO.

Finally, simply run this script and you’re golden! Yep that’s all there is to it! Just make sure to have XCode closed for this step.

#!/bin/bash
cd /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Plug-ins/iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support.xcplugin/Contents/MacOS/

dd if=iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support of=working bs=500 count=255
printf "\x8f\x2a\x00\x00" >> working
dd if=iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support of=working bs=1 skip=127504 seek=127504
/bin/mv -n iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support.original
/bin/mv working iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support
chmod a+x iPhoneOS\ Build\ System\ Support

Please post your success or failure with this in the comments forums.

The Dev Team has just announced that the purplera1n method of making sure you’ll be able to [continue to] jailbreak your 3GS is no longer necessary. It seems Apple was nice enough to dump the files in %TEMP% (Windows) and /tmp (Mac) while it is performing a restore.

*EDIT* After actually having time to think about this for a second, unless you have a reason to restore your phone (twice), the purplera1n method is a LOT more convenient. Kudos to the Dev Team for discovering this, but it’s not the best way to go about it. This of course assumes that purplera1n does its job correctly.

The short version

You should copy these files out of the respective temp folder while a restore is happening.

The slightly longer version

Part 1

Make any necessary backups (See the Jailbreaking article for tips on this)

Open Windows Explorer and put %TEMP% in the address bar. If your temp folder is cluttered, you may want to clean it up a bit at this point to make things easier.

If you’re on a Mac, it’s the same basic idea, except you would open Finder and navigate to /tmp.

Open iTunes and begin a restore

***WARNING*** Be certain that you are restoring 3.0  ***WARNING***

If you have been anywhere near the 3.1 beta, be absolutely positive you are restoring to 3.0 or you may lose the ability to jailbreak [forever].

While the restore is running, watch the temp folder, you should see at least one new folder created, probably with a meaningless name.

View the contents of the folder and find iBEC.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu, copy this file elsewhere.

Part 2

Put your phone into DFU mode by first turning it off. Then hold the power/sleep button (the one on the top) and the Home button (the one on the front) for 10 seconds, then release the power/sleep button and continue holding Home. If all goes well, iTunes will tell you it has detected an iPhone in recovery mode and the screen on your phone will remain black. If the apple logo appears and you are still holding the power/sleep button, you will likely have to try again.

Once the phone is in DFU mode, perform another restore, this time looking for the file named iBSS.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu.

And that’s it! Take those files and burn them and go bury them in your backyard! Well, maybe not, but keep them safe! There is no imediate use for them, but you will likely need them when you are able to use Ultrasn0w / Redsn0w.

Stay tuned for more info as it develops…