If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone running the 2.0 firmware, you’ve currently just got the Cydia application for installing new apps, not the old, familiar Installer app that was the far more ‘mainstream’ option up through firmware 1.1.4.
Good news if you’re hankering for Installer though - an update last week on the RiP Dev blog sounds very positive:
Hi folks! Many of you are wondering what’s up with Installer 4. No, we haven’t slowed down the work on it, and are currently in the final stages of hooking the GUI to the back-end. We will be contacting the authors of the major repositories in a few days to invite them into the testing process and to prepare for the upcoming repository changes.
Installer Kicks App Store’s Arse?
So hopefully we are not far off seeing Installer released for iPhone 2.0 - and it’s looking awfully good in the preview screenshots like the one above. Check out more of them HERE.
After having spent a few weeks with the App Store now, I have to say the content of it (i.e. the number of cool apps) is very impressive. But … the performance, the actual working of the App Store is not so great. I’d say Installer kicked its butt in working solidly and just doing its job reliably.
Another much-anticipated program has made it into the iPhone App Store - the 1Password password manager / digital wallet application.
I’ve been using this app on my Mac, and on the iPhone via its secure bookmarklets - for some months now, and have been very much looking forward to seeing the full iPhone native version. I’ve only just installed it, so no thoughts on it yet, except that I’m glad to see it.
eWallet and SplashID are already very worthwhile apps in this area - now it looks as if we may be spoiled a bit with several good, solid choices for protecting our confidential data on the iPhone.
1Password is available now in the App Store, and is FREE.
Palringo is a new instant messaging app for the iPhone, and the first one that supports multiple IM services to make the App Store.
As you can see in the screenshot above, it supports most of the leading IM services, including Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger.
AT&T also confirmed that sales of the iPhone 3G were "nearly double levels achieved in AT&T’s 2007 iPhone launch" across the 12 days following its US launch. And that’s despite limited availability of the device.
That’s a little excerpt from AT&T’s reporting of their second quarter results last week. I’d been waiting for some sort of comparison of the sales success during the first iPhone launch vs. this year and the 3G model - as it still seems slightly incredible to me that the lines and shortages have carried on this long.
I’m looking forward to seeing more sales numbers from AT&T and Apple to put this all in good context …
Cool jailbreak app of the weekend? No doubt about this weekend’s winner - now that Quake4iPhone has appeared on the Cydia installer.
We’d been seeing reports for quite a bit about Quake getting ported to the iPhone - nice to see it made it.
I’ve only tried the game out briefly today, but it plays well so far. There is an Options area (which I found a little difficult to work with), sound and music, and very little lag when playing. Main thing, it’s quite playable - moving around and firing are easy to do.
It doesn’t make use of the accelerometer - but if you’re a Quake fan, this is a good bit of Sunday fun for sure.
Just a few days after Pwnage Tool launched as a Mac-only first jailbreak application for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software, there is now a Windows solution as well.
Winpwn 2.0 is the answer for Windows users looking to jailbreak iPhone 2.0 / 3G models. Among its features are:
One of the many noticeable weak areas so far in the iPhone 2.0 software is a certain amount of lag / slowness in various places. For me, the Contacts application, and in particular the Search portion of it, is one area where this is definitely felt.
So I was very glad to come across a quick but super useful tip from everythingiCafe forum member i Robot - in this thread - which points out that the new (and free) Google Search app does a great job at searching contacts.
And it sure does. It feels considerably faster to me than the built-in app, and lets you tap to go directly to a selected contact just as you can in the built-in applet. A little embarassing for Apple that Google’s app can out-do theirs, but good for us to know about
Mocha VNC is one of the most talked about and popular (currently Number 29 on the Top Free Apps list) free apps available in the iPhone App Store - offering a client for remotely connecting to your computer via the iPhone.
Now, in addition to the original ‘Lite’ - and free - version, there is also a Full, paid-for version. The Full version goes for $5.99.
Our good friend Dan over at What’s On iPhone has got a post up detailing what you get with the Full version, and some thoughts on whether it’s worthwhile.
For now, the Full version’s extras are pretty minimal it seems to me, but maybe these will be extended over time.
Check out Dan’s post HERE for the full comparison …
Posted By PatrickJ on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 under General | No Comments
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But under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0’s performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, and in side-by-side comparisons using my wife’s iPhone running 1.1.4, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS …
The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0.
John Gruber at the excellent Daring Fireball site has done some benchmark testing of the MobileSafari browser on the iPhone, comparing the performance under the latest 2.0 software to previous firmware - and seeing major speed improvements under 2.0.
John’s article also points out that this speed gain is not only felt in the Safari browser on the iPhone, but also in many other apps that make use of their own built-in WebKit browsers - like NetNewsWire, Twitterific, and many others.
My own feeling so far is in line with these tests - browsing and page loading does seem a fair bit faster under the new firmware. What do you all think? How are you finding the browsing experience / performance on 2.0?
Posted By PatrickJ on Monday, July 21, 2008 under General | 2 Comments
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Nate True - creator of Tap Tap Revenge and old-school iPhone hacking guru - has posted a set of detailed instructions for tethering with the iPhone 3G - so that you can make use of its 3G speeds as a modem for a laptop or similar.
The process requires a jailbroken iPhone 3G, involves a relatively lengthy set of steps on both the iPhone and a desktop browser, and is not for the faint of heart for sure. It is also absolutely against the terms of your AT&T contract and doing it could leave you exposed to data overage charges!
If you’re cool with all of the above warnings and keen to give tethering a crack, check out Nate’s step-by-step guide HERE …
After working with hundreds of other mobile devices, developing for the iPhone is a breath of fresh air. The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena. — Jonathan Backer, The Walt Disney Company
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