cydia
If you keep up with this blog, you’ll know that I suffered major trauma trying to jailbreak my iPhone recently
Now I am pleased to be able to give an update, after having success!
What you see below is a very short, very amateur, video made in the middle of the night with my iPhone … just a proof of concept really.
Yesterday I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. Today, I’ll share with you some things I learnt during the failed attempt!
Firstly, DO NOT attempt to jailbreak your iPhone from a MacBook Pro running Leopard 10.5.6 … all the indications are that you’ll end up with a MacBook with no keyboard or mouse, an an unchanged iPhone.
So what did I learn?
As a previous Linux user I naturally have a long and happy relationship with Firefox. But after switching to my MacBook Pro I made the decision to give Safari (the OSX “native” browser) a fair appraisal before carrying over my preference for Firefox.
So far the experience has been great, Safari has a beautiful rendering engine, most of the features of Firefox and an excellent Bookmarks Manager. So, for the time being, Safari remains as my browser of choice on my Mac.
However, there has been one missing feature which has been bugging me up until a few minutes ago. This was the fact that links on web pages which were set to open a new window did just that… opened the link in a new window! The result, after even a relatively short research session, was a proliferation of Safari windows.
Help is at hand! There is a way to change this behaviour so that Safari opens a new tab, rather than a new window. The way to change the default behaviour is so obscure, yet so easy, that I just had to share it with you.
Open a terminal session (using Finder you’ll find terminal under Utilities) and on the command line type…
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool TRUE
and press Enter.
It’s that simple!
OmniFocus for the iPhone
Therefore, OmniFocus has become one of the first licenses I have purchased.
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The very first thing that my wife noticed about the spanking new iPhone I bought her recently was the glassy touch screen. You might have thought that her comment would be along the lines of “amazing technology”, “beautifully elegant interface” … but no, it was more like “how will I keep it clean“!
Pogo iPhone Stylus
A later observation related to the fact that she has had to develop a touch style which works with her beautifully manicured (long) fingernails. This was after discovering that several improvised “styli” did not work.
I, of course, informed her that her new iPhone’s glassy touch sensitive screen is only sensitive to human fingers. Why? Because it uses a technology called capacitive touch which I am told measures the flow of electrons through the skin. Problem is, even without the manicured nails, fingers are pretty rounded and not too precise at picking out tiny URLs in Safari.
Luckily the geniuses behind the Pogo iPhone Stylus have magically solved this problem by making a stylus that somehow tricks the iPhone into thinking it’s really a finger. What’s more, the tip of the stylus is a soft felt like material that has the added benefit of keeping your screen clean while you tap away. How do they do it? Frankly I have no idea, but hopefully it doesn’t involve grave-robbing. (Leave a comment if you know the answer).
Two weeks ago I made the radical switch from Linux to Mac in the hope that I would achieve the advantages of a fully supported, integrated platform (Apple/OSX) without losing too much of the pure power, security and flexibility of Linux.
So far, my hopes have been hugely exceeded and I have already benefited from massive productivity improvements, had a great deal of fun, and achieved things in a few minutes which I have wasted hours upon hours trying to perfect on Linux.
The process of adding functionality to my MacBook Pro is still more akin to Linux than that other operating system. Still need to do some research (ie Google-ing) and often need to give the system a bit of a helping hand. Since OSX is Unix, this is straight forward to someone with my background… may be a bit foreign to someone moving from the “Dark Side”!