Fring Science

I’ve been using Fring before during the 1.x firmware days. It was the first IM client to support Yahoo! Messenger. The functionality is okay but the interface could use a little makeover.

Fast forward several months. Fring is back, but on the Apple AppStore this time. When it comes to functionality and eye-candy, Beejive wins over Fring by a mile lightyear. Excluding the price factor, any normal user would ditch Fring for Beejive.

Fring has an edge over all IM clients.  It supports SIP, including your very own Asterisk.  With Truphone, well, you’re just confined to their service.  It’s no X-Lite but it provides the basic features of a soft phone.

The different SIP providers above are merely templates.  There are only 3 important fields when configuring a subscription: User ID (extension number), Password and Proxy server.  Select Other at the bottom to register to your Asterisk box.

What I like best about Fring is that you can also receive calls, with caller ID.  There’s a nice SIP client before (siphone was the name, I think) but it only allows outgoing calls.

Fring also supports call history and access to your address book.

Now, can you say “unlimited calls” ?

Frankenstein

I dont like Neurox Leopard anymore.  I’ve been using it since 1.1.1 IIRC.  The themes that I like have truncated icons,  so I made my own theme.  I’m not sure, but I think the Springboard truncates the icons after 60 pixels.   Most themes have icons with >60px in width or height.  They have to be resized to 60×60px

Thanks to those who submitted their themes in Cydia, I now have my very first “frankensteined” Summer/Winterboard theme!  I’m not going to distribute this theme, so there’s no need to give credit to the individual makers of the icons.

The iTunes icon is mine (sort of). First, I tried to look for iTunes icons in Google Images.  I found a few and I opened one in Gimp.  It turns out it’s not transparent yet.  I’m not a graphics artist so I know shit about transparency.  After some googling, I found out that I need to add an “alpha” layer, aside from the usual RGB layer.  Using the magic lasso thing, I cleared the background, scaled it to 60×60, saved it as .png and loaded it to my phone.  After respringing, transparency win!  It’s transparent but it’s fugly.  It’s so fugly I dont wanna post it here.  The edges are so crooked, there’s extra shadow at the bottom, etc. All in all, FAIL!

Attemp #2: I “extracted” it from iTunes.app in Leopard using ‘Get Info’ -> click the icon on the top left -> Edit -> Copy then Preview -> File -> New From Clipboard.  I removed the shadow at the bottom using Gimp, scaled it to 60×60, scp’ed it to the phone, resprung, and there you go. iTunes icon WIN!

I haven’t decided on a dock and background image yet.  It already looks kinda nice without one.

iPhone 2.1

Update includes:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls  (I haven’t really had any dropped calls since I first used my iPhone)
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes  (Now it only takes around 10-15 mins what normally takes 3 hours to finish)
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts  (Opening mails in Mail2web is still sluggish. As long as push notifications are fast, it’s fine by my standards)
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications

• Improved performance in text messaging  (SMS.app is more responsive now, but still no forwarding or MMS)
• Faster loading and searching of contacts  (Finally!)
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display  (I don’t have 3G)
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages  (Every 5mins. This is pretty handy)
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts  (I dont wanna wipe out my phone besides I dont use passcodes and it looks to be broken on 2.0.2)
• Genius playlist creation  (I only have 2 genres: punk and grunge)

It took me >5 fucking hours to update and jailbreak 2.1. Why?

• I gave up after an hour of backing up my iPhone on iTunes 8. The progress bar is not even on the 25% mark.  I want to be able to restore to 2.0.2 in case my upgrade to 2.1 fails and I dont want to redo my games all over again.
• I fucked up my WinXP box.  As of this writing, the latest version of Quickpwn is Windows only.  Command-line shell access is required and thanks to my sister’s iPod, Windows is infected with this bar311.exe malware, which runs a shutdown script everytime you spawn a command prompt.  I tried to erase it in the registry, but I might have accidentally deleted an important key.  Now, any user who logs in is automatically logged out right away.  Sucks.  I should have just followed (again) that howto in TPC.
• The XP installer I used is an old one.  It only has SP1 slipstreamed.  I had to download the 300+MB Service Pack 3 because iTunes 7.7 requires at least SP2

NOTE:  To those wondering by Genius is not enabled on their iPhone 2.1, first you have to enable Genius on your iTunes 8 (IMS Account is required) and then sync.

There are some changes that weren’t included in the changelog.

• Making a screenshot now makes that camera shutter sound.
• The album name and artist now appears at the bottom of the song title in iPod.

• Apple must have changed the spacing between icons in Springboard.  Now, my dock icons are cut on the top part

UPDATE: This is actually a known bug in iPhone 2.1 and Winterboard.

• Load Earlier Messages.  I cant say if hiding older messages will show an increase in performance of the SMS app.

Getting things done with OmniFocus

OmniFocus is a GTD application by the Omni Group.  It is available in two variants: a desktop version and an iPhone version.  It’s basically a to-do app on steroids.  Aside from the usual ability to jot down tasks, you’re able to do more such as attach pictures and audio  to each tasks, categorize tasks into contexts, see what is due soon (“soon” is relative, and customizable), set deadlines and flag tasks. Plus, OmniFocus is  location aware.

I’m not really a list junkie, but being someone with the memory of a goldfish, I really need apps like this.  OmniFocus promotes planning ahead  and makes you more productive.  Jot down tasks the night before and then when you go to work the next day, you already have list of things you need to accomplish.

Here’s the main screen.  It gives a quick view of the sub menus of the application.

At first, the Inbox puzzled me.  What is this for if you can already categorize tasks into Projects of Contexts?  So, I asked a fellow OmniFocus user.  He said he puts uncategorized tasks in his Inbox.  Your wild ideas.  Having this kinda squeezes out your creative juices.

The Projects section doesn’t quite work for me.  At work, I only have one project, which is IT. There’s really not a point it creating a project under here if it always will default to that.   For some reason, OmniFocus automatically creates a Miscellaneous project if you create a task without a project.

You can attach pictures and voice recordings to your tasks.  This comes in handy when additional text notes are just not enough.

Tasks can also be flagged for easy reference.

OmniFocus for iPhone supports synchronization to MobileMe. If you dont have a MobileMe account, any Dav folder will do. It also supports SSL (even self-signed certificates) and HTTP authentication.

Core Location at work.  It’s been said that the first generation iPhone’s location service could be off by as much as 5 kilometers.  Not really a ‘must-have’, it’s very cool to have location services on your GTD application.  I think this is the only location aware GTD app in the AppStore.  The next fully-featured GTD app would have to be Things.  Things also has synchronization, but only to the desktop application.  Not on the “cloud”, as they would say.

All in all, OmniFocus is a great application.  Mobility is very important for GTD application.  On the average, you’re in front of the computer 8 hours a day, but you have your mobile phone with you all the time.  If you’re in a taxi cab you remember a task that you’re supposed to to tomorrow,  you’re not going to whip out your laptop and start writing notes.  Might as well write it on a piece of paper.  While OmniFocus is already a great app, I have a few wishes:

• Alarm – It would be nice to have iCal-like alerts when you reach your deadline.  And, no. If I want notifications, iCal is not a place to put your tasks. It’s a calendar FFS.
• Faster loading time – It takes about 7s on my phone for OmniFocus  to load, and I only have about less than 50 tasks in it.
• Faster sync – Even on (wireless)LAN, it takes quite a while for synchronization to finish.
• Address book integration – With a single tap, you can call a person or send an email while inside OmniFocus. I have People and Phone contexts in OmniFocus.  I use it to remind me when I have to call or talk to somebody.

Jailbreaking 2.0.1

iPhone Dev Team just released PwnageTool 2.0.2. It supports jailbreaking and unlocking (1st gen only) of iPhone firmware 2.0.1. I upgraded to firmware 2.0.1 just a few days ago and it jailed my phone again. I dont really need the jailbreak. Since my phone is already unlocked, it’s more of a “nice to have” than a “badly needed” feature.

Jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones have become very trivial. Using Pwnage, just load the vanilla firmware from Apple and it will create a custom firmware. You will then restore your iPhone via iTunes using this custom firmware while in DFU mode.

The only thing I really really need from the jailbreak is the option to turn off auto-correction. The auto-correction feature does not only apply when creating SMS. Notes and Mail are also affected. I’m really having a hard time texting in Tagalog because of this auto-correction. I dont text in English. I dont text my boss in English. I dont text our expats. I dont text txtspk

Here’s what I installed from Cydia

BOSS PREFS
It provides an easy way to toggle your WiFi, EDGE, SSH, etc. You can also reboot or respring from here.

MOBILE TERMINAL
This has got the be the iPhone’s killer app, and it’s not even official! It’s not an SSH client. It’s not a telnet client. It’s a vt100 emulator. You can see and edit the whole filesystem. You can execute commands from the shell. OpenSSH, wget, curl, nmap, netcat, tcpdump have all been ported to the iPhone and made available through Cydia. You can use hand gestures to scroll up, scroll down, tab completion, ^C, etc.

Mobile Terminal on 2.0+ is still a little buggy compared to the 1.x version. Going to ‘config’ crashes the app.

SCUMMVM
This is an official port of LucasArts SCUMM interpreter, used in games such as Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day Of The Tentacle and Sam and Max. Only a few people appreciate these kind of games.

Klick

Klick is a Flickr client. Let the screenshots do the talking.

Klick is available for free at the App Store

Free push email!

mail2web.com offers free email based on Microsoft Exchange. By “Exchange”, I also mean contacts and calendar synchronization. Webmail is through an ad-laden Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Note that this service doesn’t only apply to iPhones. It should integrate nicely with Windows Mobile phones. I’ll update this entry as soon as I have the time to boot up my old WM5 phone. If you dont have an iPhone or a WM, mail2web.com still will play nicely with your Outlook/Entourage.

Just configure your iPhone like this and you’re good to go.  Be sure to select Microsoft Exchange from Settings -> Mail,Contacts,Calendars -> Add account…

Note: The server field should contain mobile.exchange.mail2webcom. Sorry about that

PRO(s):

* FAST! Compared to Mobile Me’s “push” email, this one takes the cake. I use this email for email notifications from social networking sites.

* FREE!

CON(s):

* No server-side filters (like the ones in Yahoo! mail)

If you just want push email, mail2web is for you. Mobile Me is still nice, if you need a web gallery, iDisk, and if you dont mind shelling out $99/yr.

First

This reminds me of the LiveJournal client for jailbroken iPhones, but this app does more such as attaching pictures (either from Library or from camera) and managing multiple blogs. Pretty cool!

WordPress is available for free at the AppStore. Visit http://iphone.wordpress.net for more info.