Month: March 2009

iPhone/iPod Touch File As a USB Drive Without Jailbraking

If you want to edit or view files on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you used to have to Jailbrake the device and install Disk AidOpenSSH and access the files wirelessly,  but now there is a way to access the file system without having to jailbrake.
It doesn’t give you as much power as using OpenSSH but allows you to copy and paste things to and from your device.

DiskAid is a freeware application for Windows & Mac OS X, it supports both gen iPhones and both gen iPod Touchs. It will automatically detect your device, just plug in and go. It’s as simple as drag and droping the files. And it supports Firmware 1.1.1 to 2.2.

DiskAid Download Page

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Nintendo Launches Wii System Menu 4.0

Nintendo has just lauched Wii System Menu 4.0 at GDC today. You can now backup and play WiiWare titles straight from the SD card. Nintendo has now included a new menu known as the ‘SD Card Menu’, it can be accessed from the main Wii System Menu. Not only the new SD features but Nintendo has at last allowed SDHC card’s up to 32GB to work in the Nintendo Wii.

Wii Menu 4.0

Go and update youw Wii now for the new menu.

EA Mobile iPhone Game Lineup 2009

On Tuesday at GDC, EA Mobile discussed their plans for 2009 for the iPhone & iPod Touch platform.EA Logo

Tiger Woods PGA Tour has been been announced prior to this event but other games announced were:
Wolfenstein RPG
FIFA Soccer
Madden NFL
NBA Live
Spore Creatures
Mystery Mania
American Idol
Command & Conquer
SSX
Need for Speed
The Sims 3
Connect 4
Battleship
Risk
Monopoly
Trivial Pursuit
Clue

EA Mobile indicated that Trivial Pursuit and Tigher Woods PGA Tour, will be coming in Spring.

iPhone Idea: Memory

The iPhone and iPod Touch are an amazing platform for App’s. From twitter clients to full feature games. Most of these work perfectly without a hitch but when it comes to some App’s, especially Photography App’s then it’s a different story.
Photo App’s usually use a lot more memory than other App’s and frequently go over the limit of RAM it’s allowed to use causing the iPhone to close it.

Using App’s such as System we can clean up the memory and free up a lot of free space, which some people achieve via re-booting. What would be a lot better is if you have an App that needs a lot of memory clean it up before you start the App. Maybe Apple should implement a memory cleaner which works in the background when it realises a certain amount of memory is being used that cleans it up.

Here’s a screenshot of System, an App for the iPhone/iPod Touch that free’s up memory.

System_1
System_2
As you can see System freed up about 39MB of RAM making App’s which are memory intensive work a lot better.
For a better user experience either the developers or Apple should implement this feature.

Photo Editing for Free

Photoshop LogoAdobe Photoshop is the industry standard for Photo Editing however not everyone can afford a £400 piece of software. But did you know that you can get the same image editing power for absolutely nothing. In this article I’m going to cover some free alternatives which will give you the same features for free.

Paint.Net – Download

Paint.Net  features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials and plugins.

Gimp – Download

Gimp is a very powerful, advanced image editing program. It’s a lot more advanced than Paint.Net but the user interface is a lot more complicated than that of Paint.Net.

Both of these photo editing programs are completely free and Gimp is open source. If your using Linux or Mac then Gimp is available on all platforms, whereas Paint.Net is Windows only and requires the .Net Framework to be installed.
They will give you the same features for no cost and are a great addition to anyones software collection.

Thanks to Pochp who reccomened Pixlr, which is a free online photo editor very similar to Paint.Net and it doesn’t require you to install a thing so give it a shot and head over to Pixlr.

Blank Released on Mininova

Blank

The film Blank (IMDb #1326196) is the first film to be officailly released on P2P, it shows that filmakers are starting to see BitTorrent and other P2P protocols as not against them but a new way of sharing work with their audience, the difference with this and a common copy is that it allows you to donate. So say you download the film and like it you can donate back to the filmmaker

Background: Annodam Films will released the feature film ‘Blank’ from writer director Rick L. Winters on March 21, 2009 on Mininova and other torrent sites for everyone to enjoy. It is our concept that if people like the movie they will go back and make a donation or purchase the movie at www.blank-movie.com, thus allowing us to make another film and release it in the same manner. After the end credits of the movie BLANK there will be a trailer for one of the next feature films we are planning to film and release Peer to Peer.

This release could make way for a major shift in the way we experience movies, it’s unlikely as the cast and crew are paid on percentage of the gross, so no big Hollywood films. But it’s showing that film makers are starting to see P2P as a new medium of sharing there work instead of stealing it.

Mininova Torrent

BeejiveIM Fighting Piracy

Beejive IM is arguably one of the best IM clients for the iPhone and iPod Touch, however as a lot of users I prefer to try app’s before I buy and so I had the ‘cracked’ version of the Beejive IM running on my iPhone. It worked like a dream and I will be purchasing it however when I tried it out today something different happened.

I got this appear after trying to login:

Beejive IM Screen

The words PC Load Letter kept flashing so I tapped the screen, it closed Beejive IM and launched YouTube and loaded the video Office Space – I Stole Something.

Now this never came up before and so must be done server-side, but it goes to show how that App Developers are beginning to fight back against piracy.

Update – Beejive have come out with this statement:

We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers.

Hacker Enables Tethering in iPhone OS 3.0

Steve Troughton-Smith of Ireland, whilst he “was hacking around with APNs in the Carrier.bundle itcc file” managed to work out how to tether his iPhone 3G over USB.

Tethering Homescreen
Thethering Prefs


Apple did confirm that Tethering was in OS 3.0 but that it was dependent on carriers choice to weather or not it would be enabled.

For people who are unaware of what tethering is, it’s using the iPhone’s EDGE or 3G connection and using it on a computer which the phone is either attached over USB or Bluetooth, sharing the connection so that if you have no WiFi and you don’t have a 3G card you could just plug in your iPhone and browse away.

Spotify – Instant Streaming Music

Spotify LogoSpotify is freeware, currently in private beta, which allows you to stream thousands of songs to your desktop for free. It really is how they say, Instant, simple and free.
The desktop program runs like your normal media player, however instead of using your own library you just search a artist or track into the search bar and you will see a list of match’s. Once you found a song you want click on it and almost instantly it will begin as if you had it on your computer.
It achieves this using P2P technology which allows it to run seamlessly, with hardly any wait.
It currently runs on Windows and Mac OS X, there are plans of a iPhone/iPod Touch version in the future which would be great considering how vast the library is using this service.
The software is fully legal and even though it uses the P2P protocol, it’s not illegal as some people would make you believe.

If you want to try out this amazing service leave a comment on this post and the first 5 comments will receive an invite to the private beta.

iPhone Idea: Cubefield

One of my favourite flash games is Cubefield, the objective of the game is to get you through a field of cubes that are dynamically created as you play the game. I’ve thought for a long time now how good this would be as an iPhone app using the in-built accelerometers and put together a mock-up to demonstrate what it would look like.

Cubefield iPhone Mockup

As you can see it would work perfectly on iPhone and iPod Touch using the in-built accelerometers.

Update: It seems it already exsists in the App Store under Cube Runner.