Four Island

While yesterday was quite a bad day, my luck today has turned for the better! For one, I'm not angry at geohot anymore. Nope, when I finally got home to my Windows laptop today, I plugged my iPhone 4 in, synced it and ran limera1n. And, you know what? It didn't work. :( However, I tried again, this time closing iTunes before jailbreak and guess what! It worked! :D

Once again, I kind of jumped around in excitement, screaming "OMG YAY JAILBREAK OMG SCROBBL I LOVE YOU" until people started staring and I realized that those "people" were the voices inside my head....

Anyway, I'm very happy to now be jailbroken because there are some really awesome things that you can do with a jailbroken iDevice, some I had used before, some that I only tried out today:

• Scrobbl - This may be the biggest reason that I jailbreak and that's because it's just so awesome. Without a jailbreak, to scrobble songs to last.fm, you have to sync your iDevice with iTunes and use the last.fm iPod scrobbler, which, as we've seen, doesn't work too well with iOS devices. I mean, seriously, last week, I scrobbled my iPhone and found that while a whole ton of songs got scrobbled, it somehow completely forgot to note that I had listened to the album Fantasies by Metric three whole times. It often gets things wrong and requires you to sync to scrobble, and is just so annoying. With Scrobbl, songs are scrobble AS YOU PLAY THEM. You can set it to only scrobble via WiFi and to ignore podcasts (which was another problem I had with the official scrobbler--who cares about the podcasts? I don't want to scrobble them!) and it's just fantabulous. One of my favorite jailbreak apps.
• Backgrounder + MultiFl0w - Backgrounder is an amazing app that brings true multitasking to iDevices. Not iOS 4's fake multitasking (which, however, is in some cases more apt for the job because developers can specify actions upon task switching, like pausing your game), but true multitasking that can be enabled/disabled for certain apps at certain times. I really love this because it allows me to background Palringo and go watch a video and I'll know if someone's trying to talk to me because I'll hear a noise and then I'll go check Palringo and omg! Someone's talking to me! :P MultiFl0w is a replacement for iOS 4's task switcher and it's really quite pretty--it shows up to 9 open apps using an Exposé-like display. Note, MultiFl0w does cost $4.99. Backgrounder is free.

• SBSettings - Short for SpringBoard Settings, (yes, that's what those SBs everywhere stand for), SBSettings is quite a useful tool for iDevice users. It allows you to swipe across the status bar (gesture customizable) from any app and have a screen appear with options and settings in it. The best part is the toggles: you can have a bunch of toggles sitting up in your SBSettings tray and when you want to do something like turn off Cell Data or turn on Bluetooth, you simply have to swipe across the top and tap the toggle. You can also download additional toggles: I downloaded one called Rotation Inhibitor which allows you to toggle whether or not the current app will rotate automatically--and yes, it actually allows you to lock rotation in landscape mode. Horray. You can also theme SBSettings--in the picture on the left, I'm using a theme called "Bold Retina" (there is a variant that works on non-Retina displays). Finally, for you iPod touch users who are want to see how much battery life you have left in percent (because this feature is built-in on iPhones), you can enable this under "System Options" in SBSettings.
• Infiniboard (and Infinifolders!) - Infiniboard, Infinifolders (and Infinidock) are a series of awesome, SpringBoard-enhancing tweaks by chpwn. Infiniboard and Infinifolders are great for organization. With Infiniboard, you can put as many apps as you want on one SpringBoard page and just scroll through them vertically. Infinifolders is very similar: it allows you to overcome the 12-app limit on iOS 4 folders and lets you scroll through folders vertically. They're both pretty great: Infinifolders has the advantage of having being a named group, but Infiniboard has the advantage of actually working on iOS 4.1. Currently, Infinifolders just blanks the screen if you open a folder with more than 12 apps in it. Ouch. These apps do cost money, but they're pretty useful.

• LockInfo - I am absolutely in love with this. I didn't even know about it until I noticed that TimTam tweeted using it. I looked into it and it's a whole lot more amazing than it appears! First off, the basics: the Apple iPhone mysteriously lacks the ability to show the owner any useful information besides the time and any notifications that have popped up (such as SMSes) on the lockscreen. Users have to unlock the phone to see stuff. It's confused me before; I can never remember if I just received an email or not. LockInfo allows you to display information on newly received email, upcoming calendar events, missed calls, SMSes... But it's more awesome than just that: there are plugins available for LockInfo that lets you see more information on your lockscreen; Twitter, for instance. Yes, awesomeness. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a plugin for Things, the to-do app I use. Splendid! But by far the best part of LockInfo is the InfoShield (pictured on right). While your iDevice is unlocked, simply swipe down from the status bar and the InfoShield will appear, containing all of the information that LockInfo shows on the lockscreen. It's like the notifications tray on Android phones. Very awesome. :D This app does cost money, though, but it's so totally worth it.

Some other awesome apps you should try if you're jailbroken are MultiIconMover (a convenient tweak that allows you to move multiple icons at once (note: does not work with folders)) and WinterBoard (allows you to theme your SpringBoard and lockscreen. Some would advertise this app more prominently, but I don't really use it that much).

Wow, I didn't really expect to be reviewing all of my favorite jailbreak apps when I started this post, but at that point, I didn't even have LockInfo yet and I'm in love with it, so, :P. Anyway, the other reason why Sunday Is Funday is the fact that Ubuntu 10.10 came out today! The upgrade itself was pretty easy (easier than 10.04--nothing went wrong!) and nothing seems to be going horribly so far. I'll write a full post about 10.10 when I've used it for a bit and discovered any horrific problems that need to be ranted about (and besides, this post is plenty long already :P), but let me just say now: I really love the new Ubuntu Font. It's just so fantastic and pretty. <3 Ubuntu Font.

If you haven't been paying attention to the updates on my previous post, well, strange stuff has been happening in the world of iPhone jailbreak. A long-dead hacker named geohot famous for his blackra1n jailbreak has mysteriously reappeared a claimed to have a jailbreak named limera1n which will be released October 11th, the day after GreenPois0n.

Well, that seems to have changed. Because it's out. Now. Whut. There's only a windows version available (that's why I'm frantically trying to get a tiny netbook working with my iPhone--I don't have my Windows lappy with me), but this is just... wow. I know, I'm excited about jailbreaking my iPhone, but geohot is really placing the jailbreak community into an odd place. Chronic Dev now has to decide whether to burn SHAtter, or try to implement limera1n. It's kind of insane. And it's making me doubt that GreenPois0n will come out tomorrow. Which means that, if limera1n doesn't work for me, I will be angry. Very angry.

A FEW MINUTES LATER: It's not working. And I'm angry. Because GreenPois0n may not be released because of this and that means that geohot just took my jailbreak away. I'm annoyed. There better be a jailbreak that works by 10-10-10 10:10:10.

EDIT: I do not recommend trying limera1n. I've been trying to jailbreak for a few hours now and my iPhone is now stuck in recovery mode and I can't get it out using iRecovery. So, basically, I'm screwed. Wait until tomorrow and see if Chronic Dev does anything awesome. Don't try limera1n. Geohot is an a-hole.

EDIT 2: Okay, I managed to get my iPhone out of recovery mode using a Mac and I'm not totally screwed anymore, but I'm still going to wait until tomorrow for news rather than try using limera1n anymore. I'm angry at you, @geohot.

EDIT 3: iPhone Dev Team has just made the announcement: They're not releasing GreenPois0n tomorrow. I, for one, am disappointed. Thanks, @geohot, I'm angry with you. That is, unless, I get home tomorrow to my Windows laptop and find that limera1n actually does work. That'd be great! :P

Another update on the iPhone jailbreak situation. Things are getting more exciting as the dev teams work on their jailbreak and we can now expect to see a release within days, not weeks. Yes, days. How do we know? Someone on Twitter asked a pod2g for an ETA (wow, no kidding), and actually got a response:

@Pod2G the release date be count by days or week ?

asendari

@asendari I would say days.

pod2g

HOW EXCITING IS THAT? :D Of course, this doesn't guarantee that the release will be out soon, but I'm fairly hopeful for a SHAttering release this weekend. :)

The other thing I wanted to write about was the type of the jailbreak. If you didn't know, there are two types of jailbreak: tethered and untethered. Untethered is what you JailbreakMe folks are lucky enough to have; tethered, which seems to be more common, means that you have to jailbreak your iDevice every time you turn it on. Ouch. Anyway, as this jailbreak is not even out yet, we have no clue which type it will be, though some believe it will probably start out tethered. However, there is still hope. I did some poking around The iPhone Wiki (an official source for jailbreaking information) and found this gem:

Until Apple patches the bootrom in these things, (which is probably 5-6 months away...) their whole SHSH system becomes irrelevant and defeated (and lolz) because now the ramdisks can have all that SHSH+ECID crap patched out of them, allowing arbitrary downgrades all the way to 4.0 on a 4.1 (or later) out-of-the-box iPhone 4. But because Apple will eventually patch this, Saurik's SHSH system will always be important.

lemit737

Don't get it? What this possibly means is that even if this jailbreak turns out to be tethered, you should be able to use the jailbreak to downgrade to iOS 4.0.1 and then use JailbreakMe there to get an untethered jailbreak! I asked about this on the discussion page and someone confirmed that this could indeed be possible. So, don't worry about the type of jailbreak this will be; you'll probably end up with an untethered jailbreak anyway. :D

Anyway, there has been a lot of plot advancement in the iPhone jailbreaking world in the last few weeks! Let's just hope that this jailbreak is finally released this weekend, which would totally be great. :P

Good news for all of you who, like me, bought an iPhone 4 and received it pre-loaded with the unjailbreakable iOS 4.0.2: your suffering may soon be over. iOS 4.1, the first major update to iOS 4, is expected to be released today. Yes, today. Obviously, Apple has kept quiet about the release date, but two pieces of evidence clearly point to today as the final release date:

• After iOS 4.1 was announced at last week's Apple Music Event, the Apple website was updated to include information about the upcoming iOS 4.1 update. However, for a few days, the British and French versions of the Apple website clearly stated "Coming September 8th", while the American one still said "Coming Soon". This has been fixed.
• Apple releases beta and RC versions of it's iOS software for people with registered Developer iPhones and iPod touches to test out. However, another Apple goof has resulted in everyone being able to utilize the iOS 4.1 RC image, not just the developers. While this in itself is not indicative of an impending release, the fact that early this morning, the Game Center feature included in iOS 4.1 went live, is.

However good the chances seem that iOS 4.1 will be released today, though, it doesn't necessarily mean that the iOS 4.1 jailbreak will be as well. A series of misinformation from unreliable sources and contradicting confirmations from reliable sources has led to a lot of confusion about the upcoming jailbreak. One thing that we all seem to know for sure, however, is that the new jailbreak could take one of two forms: a userland jailbreak (like the JailbreakMe website jailbreak) or a bootrom jailbreak. A userland jailbreak, if a usable exploit was found, would be much easier to make and therefore would arrive faster. However, as seen with JailbreakMe and iOS 4.0.2, Apple can also patch them very easily. A bootrom jailbreak, conversely, would be a lot more difficult to create, but would be impossible for Apple to patch without releasing a new hardware device. The bootrom hole primarily used to jailbreak in the past was present in all iPhone 2Gs, iPhone 3Gs and iPod touches (first gen) and half of iPhone 3GSes and iPod touches (second gen) before Apple finally got around to patching it. A new bootrom jailbreak, if found, could be used to jailbreak iPhones and iPod touches for a long time to come.

However, that's where our definite knowledge ends. Many people suspect that Comex, the author of the JailbreakMe exploit, is going to be the one to provide the next jailbreak, and that seemed to be confirmed by iPhone hacker MuscleNerd:

@TechXero it'll be userland JB if @comex can pull trifecta.
Else, wait for new HW cycle (also remember: hole!=exploit)

However, Comex has very recently posted a tweet which may imply that this is not the case:

@ariif next jb might not come from me :D

Hopefully, if this is the case, it still means that a jailbreak will be ready for release very soon. Also, rumors have been making their way around the Internet that the iOS 4.1 jailbreak is already done and will likely be released today. While this would be a great outcome, it's fairly unlikely and we should all just cross our fingers that Comex is able to pull off "trifecta". :)

Lastly: while jailbreakers everywhere have informed several times that it would be unwise to update to iOS 4.1 without a jailbreak being available, those who are not yet jailbroken should at least give it a try. However, there is a chance, albeit small, that a new jailbreak might not work with iOS 4.1, instead relying on iOS 4.0.2. Even though this is incredibly unlikely, I suggest that you use TinyUmbrella to save your SHSH blobs (no jailbreak required) before upgrading to iOS 4.1 so that if this actually happens, you can safely go back to iOS 4.0.2. The newest version even includes the ability to prevent your baseband from being upgraded, for those of you who wish to unlock their phones, as the new baseband included with iOS 4.1 is not yet unlockable.

EDIT: It seems I forgot to post this post in the morning and now it is too late: iOS 4.1 is now out and more information about a jailbreak has been released. A hacker named "pod2g" apparently found a bootrom exploit (remember, hole doesn't equal exploit, but they definitely said "exploit", which means it's likely to work) just as Apple went public with the final release of iOS 4.1. The good news is that, yay, there will definitely be a jailbreak. The bad news? It might take a while.

In the mean time, I'm currently upgrading my iPhone 4 to iOS 4.1 because I have no jailbreak to lose and I can always go back to iOS 4.0.2 if need be. However, this will still probably not be necessary because the expected jailbreak is going to be a bootrom exploit. Regardless, let's all hope it comes out soon because I want my iPhone jailbreak! :P

Okay, so as I mentioned recently, I got an iPhone 4. Yes, yes, I am the same person that hates Macs and is supposed to be Apple apathetic but forgets most of the time and the one that use to insult iPhones all the time (though that may be because I was forced to watch a half-hour video on iPhones when they first came out by my cousin) until I got an iPod touch and really liked it and have now shifted my ray of insulting to iPads. Yes, amidst all of that, I recently got an iPhone and what's more, I LOVE IT. :D It is just so awesome. Feel free to call me a hypocrite if you want. :P

I think the core reason I like it so much is that I liked my iPod touch so much. Now, I basically have an iPod touch, just better! :P Here are some of the things I really like about my iPhone 4 that my iPod touch 3rd gen didn't have:

• Well, to be obvious: phone functionality. Calling and texting. It's just so nice! I love having my phone and my iPod in one device, so that now I won't leave anywhere without it. And being able to send MMSes is great too, especially as my old phone couldn't do that. :P
• Retina display. Yeah, when I first heard about the iPhone 4, I was like "Okay, so it has a clear display. So?" RETINA DISPLAY IS AWESOME. Everything looks so clear on my phone! After I synced it for the first time, I spent a very long time just staring at the various screens because they looked so nice! Apple was actually right: the only pixels I could discern were the ones in the icons for apps not yet upgraded to support retina display (as well as the apps themselves). Looking at my brothers' iPod touches felt weird after that. :P
• Camera. I don't really know why the iPod touch lacks a camera because it isn't really a phone-specific feature, but I love having it now! And there are actually two cameras--one in the front and a higher definition one in the back. Now I can take pictures (and videos!) with my iPhone too! :D
• Built-in microphone. As it's a phone, the need for a built-in microphone is obvious, but it's useful for other things like Voice Control and Voice Memos and Shazam that you would need to plug a microphone in to use on the iPod touch.
• INTERNET (pretty much) EVERYWHERE (in America). It's a smartphone. And what do most smartphones require you to get? That's right: a data plan. While I don't have an unlimited data plan (AT&T redacted those earlier this year sadly--incidentally on the same day that the iPhone 4 was announced), it's nice to know that if I'm somewhere without WiFi and I want to talk to my friends or check my email or look something up on Wikipedia, I can! As my plan isn't unlimited, though, after about a month, I want to write a post on the data plan, if it's enough data (200MB) and if AT&T is screwing me over or not. Won't that be fun? :P
• The device just looks so nice! As you probably know, the iPhone 4 features a new design that looks different to every other iPod touch and iPhone as it has a flat back and a silver band running around the edge. It's preeety. :P

Yes, I love my iPhone. However, not everything's sunshine and butterflies. I do have a small list of complaints about it:

• The attenuation problem. Yes, it's true, but really, it's not that annoying. It's only if you cover the tiny black band in the lower left of the phone and it's not too difficult to avoid it.
• No available jailbreak. iOS 4.0.2 was released a few weeks before I got my iPhone, meaning that it came with it preinstalled. As you probably know, iOS 4.0.2 fixes the hole that made the jailbreak for 4.0 possible, so there are no currently available jailbreaks. However, the iPhone Dev Team have said that they know of another jailbreak and that they would probably release it when iOS 4.1 gets released; so here's hoping that's soon!

Yes, those are really the only problems I currently have with my iPhone. :P Yes, I've done a complete 180°, but still! The iPhone! It's awesome! :P Okay, by now you can probably tell that I'm a bit insane, so I'll let this post end. Also, I wrote this post earlier this week and I only realized I hadn't posted it yet when it was 11pm on Friday night. :P So, I guess I'll post it now and you people can tell me if I'm insane in the morning. Anyway:

**Starla**: IPADS ARE DISGUSTING! Oh mah gawd I luve my iPhone!!!!! <3 :D :D

While I love my newly jailbroken iPod, I really do have to say that I think the word "jailbreak" was a poor choice for the process of opening up your iPod. To some people, the subword "jail" means that the process is illegal and bad things could possibly happen. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Jailbreaking is the name of a perfectly legal method of opening up your iPod so that you can run homebrew apps on it. I jailbroke my Wii last year and no one batted an eyelash, though I admittedly didn't call it "jailbreaking" at the time.

Basically, in this post, I want to run though exactly what jailbreaking is, what it isn't and why it might possibly have a bad reputation. This was sparked by the fact that a few days ago, when I told someone I knew that I jailbroke my iPod, he was astonished that I would do that. I asked him why and he said "Well, that means you get all the apps on the App Store for free!"

....

"Whut?" I spluttered. "That's not true."

"No, it is!" he yelled, "Jailbreaking is illegal!"

It turns out that his poor source of information was a friend of his that I wouldn't normally consider to be the most intelligent person ever. He apparently learned somewhere of a hack allowing you to pirate apps that utilized a jailbroken iPod and automatically assumed that that was what jailbreaking was. He also decided that jailbreaking was dangerous and could destroy your iPod after he, note, went into Settings and deleted all of his content. Manually. By himself. And he blamed it on the jailbreak.

....whut.

Sure, I won't deny it, you could theoretically use a jailbroken iPod to pirate apps, but that's not what jailbreaking is for. To quote Wikipedia:

Some jailbreakers also attempt to pirate paid App Store applications. This focus has caused some strife within the jailbreaking community, as it was not the original focus of jailbreaking and is illegal.

iOS (Apple) on Wikipedia

Jailbreaking is not the act of pirating apps, it is the act of using a bug in Apple's software to install a third-party app. It's for those people who want to write iPhone apps but don't want to have to pay Apple $99 a year or those who want to write apps that do stuff outside of the official API (like the awesome Scrobbl (live scrobbling) or Backgrounder (true multitasking)).

Also, jailbreaking started out with a completely different use. Not many people know this, but when the iPhone first came out, there was no App Store. There was literally no way to get apps onto your iPod... other than jailbreaking it. And that's what jailbreaking is really for: getting apps onto your iPod. The only reason piracy got dragged into this is because jailbroken iPods allow for the installation of apps that haven't been approved by Apple, and could therefore do bad things. As stated earlier, piracy is not the intent of most jailbreakers and my brother's claim that "If you say 'jailbreak' to any American, they will think you are pirating apps" is a complete falsity. And not a true one, either. :P

The other reason that jailbreaking has a bad name is because there is one other illegal thing you can do with it: SIM unlocking, which is the act of allowing the iPhone to use another network besides AT&T. In America, AT&T has a monopoly on iPhones (which is technically the reason the iPhone was created--as a secret deal between Apple and AT&T) and using a network other than AT&T with your iPhone is not allowed. However, this is basically the extent of bad things you could do with a jailbroken iPod; Apple has even said that they will not attempt to break jailbroken apps other than ones that perform SIM unlocking. So you don't have to worry about anything; unless you are actually trying to do something illegal, your jailbroken iPod is protected.

Last thing: the claim that jailbreaking your iPod is dangerous is also untrue. I've had my jailbroken iPod for a week now and it's not a brick yet (though SpringBoard did crash once, but that was easily fixable by uninstalling an offending app). The claims that you can destroy your iPod while jailbreaking it are too unrealistic as most jailbreaking methods require you to install a new firmware on your iPod and iTunes will automatically make a backup of your device when you do that, so that you can restore to a working firmware if anything goes wrong. Also, with the new jailbreak that I pointed out last time (which is awesomely codenamed Star :P), the entire jailbreak is done on your iPod and has a very small chance of failure (though it is suggested that you backup your iPod with iTunes before jailbreaking anyway).

So there it is, folks. Jailbreaking is awesome and there is nothing wrong with it unless you are trying to make there be something wrong with it. I want to write Maze Of Life for the iPhone; is that wrong? No! Not at all. :) Incidentally, the original reason that I preferred a BlackBerry over an iPhone is the fact that you can easily write programs for the BlackBerry, but now with jailbreaking, you can do that for the iPhone too! Yay!

Also, I just wanted to point out that I am awesome and a trend-setter as after I jailbroke my iPod on Monday, TimTam followed suit. Drifty has jailbroken her iPod, as well as a few others', apparently. :P Jailbreaking for the win!

As most of you may know, I am filled with a contempt for Facebook that is a lot of contempt. Why yes. Dot dot dot. Anyway, though I have not yet posted my reasons for quitting Facebook on Four Island, I will make sure that I do so before I completely quit. Yes, I'm only going to gradually phase out of Facebook because a lot of people still use Facebook for a ton of various things and while it's going to be difficult convincing my friends to use these alternatives that exist, it will hopefully be possible.

You may notice that this post says "Phase 2". That is because I have already been doing Phase 1 for quite a while: stop logging into Facebook. I haven't logged into the Facebook Website (though I still log into Facebook Chat via Pidgin) for quite some time now; the only exceptions being when people specifically tell me to go look at something. So I think Phase 1 has been a success.

Phase 2 starts today. As of August 6th 2010, I have disabled email notifications on Facebook messages. That means that if you send me a Facebook message (instead of doing the proper thing and just emailing me), I will not know about it, I will not read it and I will certainly not respond to it. Sorry if this sounds a bit mean, but I am very tired of receiving emails from Facebook notifying me of messages that I have to go back to Facebook to reply to and not being able to have my entire email archive IN my email account and having the nice pretty email threads that GMail does.

I will probably not implement Phase 3 for a month or so, just so people can get used to Phase 2. While Phase 2 isn't really too difficult to do as most people have normal email accounts (in fact, you need to have one to get a Facebook account), Phase 3 is a bit more dangerous because it assesses the laziness of my friends. YOU CAN DO IT, FRIENDS! BE STRONG! :P

So, remember, the next time you want to send me an asynchronous long message, what do you do? Email it to me. Because if you Facebook Message it to me, it would be equivalent to writing a letter and then burning it. Because I may never, in fact, see it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, you may have noticed: I changed the font on Four Island for Layout 7. It's a webfont called Delicious (with a fallback of Verdana) that I think looks quite beautiful and just the right size. This is a pleasant change from Lucida Grande (with a fallback of Arial) which, though I LOVE Lucida Grande in the desktop environment, I think made Four Island rather ugly and difficult to read. Hopefully this works well! :D

Yes, I am going to yell at Apple in this post. But, first of all, let me make something clear: while I have been largely negative toward Apple in the past (and I still am apathetic towards the Mac, which was my original target), I love my iPod touch. I don't know how I lived without it. I mean, as I type this, I am on vacation, at a hotel, swinging on a swing while listening to music. I know, right? :P (Though I really do want an iPhone; I mean, seriously, Internet everywhere? Awesome!)

But right now, I'm fairly annoyed at them. On July 31st, I got two iTunes giftcards and used $5.99 off one of them to purchase an upgrade to Palringo Premium (a version of Palringo, an awesome instant messaging app for iPhones, that has features that I need like Message Logging :P). My account was debited, but I never received the upgrade. Shock. And horror, I guess. I tried to report this to Apple, but when I went to iTunes to do so, the link simply sent me to Apple's support site. What? Something was definitely wrong, because if I tried to report a problem with any other purchase, it would let me. This made me very angry. I sent an email to Palringo's support team and have not yet received a response. A response better come or else.... I'LL START SINGING KATE NASH SONGS! :P

Anyway, on a lighter note, I did something yesterday that made me love my iPod even more. That's right, I jailbroke it. :P I had been trying to find a way to jailbreak my iPod, but newer iDevices (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 2 MC model and iPod touch 3) with iOS 4 had no available jailbreaks and I was sad. However, when I was searching around again yesterday, I found something amazing. A brand new (it literally came out like yesterday or the night before) userland jailbreak for nearly every iDevice, compatible with iOS 4.

I think, at that point, I started jumping around and spitting out my cream soda, which was a bit of a shame because you can't get cream soda anywhere and I do love it. The best part of this jailbreak, though? IT'S SO EASY. You literally just have to open a page in Safari, slide a bar to the right to activate the jailbreak and wait a few minutes. You will likely have to retry quite a few times because the jailbreak is brand new and the servers are clogged (rebooting helps too), but it's soooooo worth it. Here, read this tutorial.

Anyway, now I have something that makes me happy. And what's that? LIVE SCROBBLING ON MY IPOD OH YEAH FIRE MUFFINS. Seriously, I told you before, I'm insane. And the iPod scrobbler that I used to have to use on my computer would either scrobble each song far too many times or take a very long time doing the right job. And either way would result in completely falsified timestamps because the iPod could only track the last listen of a song. Now, with the Scrobbl app, songs are scrobbled AS I LISTEN TO THEM and if I don't have WiFi at the moment, it'll queue the songs for scrobbling for the next time I am connected. THIS.... THIS IS JUST AWESOME. GIVE ME A HUG, SCROBBL. GIVE ME A HUG.

Anyway, I am very excited about that and doing more jailbroken-y things on my iPod. What's that? I could do what? I COULD MAKE APPS FOR MY IPOD NOW?!?!? Yes, that would be AWESOME: I could make apps for my iPod now that it's jailbroken! I could totally write Maze Of Life or something, create my own Cydia repository and put it up! IT WOULD BE GREAT-TASTIC! Of course, I'd have to learn Objective-C and all of Apple's garbage APIs, but wouldn't it be fun to develop apps for the iPod? Yes, WOULDN'T IT?!?!?!?

Oh, by the way, that reminds me: I've had a new version of Maze Of Life that I've been meaning to release for quite a while. I should do that soon. :P

iOS 4 came out! About two hours after yesterday's post was posted, I believe. Yes. It took another half an hour to download and install the update, but it was pretty much worth it. Check out it's awesomeness!

Home Screen Wallpapers These look REALLY NICE. Seriously! The default ones look really boring in the options menu, but when you put them on, most of them look really nice! I chose the fifth row, second column. The one with the shades of blue. It looks nice!

Multitasking As I ranted about yesterday, this has been a bit of a disappointment because apps have to be updated to support it, but I have seen some of its capability because Wordpress has been updated to support fast app switching! I just switched out and then back in and IT WAS IN THE SAME PLACE!!!! :P Anyway, I just really hope that Byline and Palringo get updated for iOS 4 because that would be awesome :P.

Omg Problems Speaking of Byline, I think the current version conflicts with iOS 4 or something because it now crashes randomly, which is really annoying. Meh!

iBooks OMG! iBooks is awesome and I never thought I would say that because I'm really a "real book" kind of person, just like I'd rather purchase CDs in the store than online, but iBooks is cool because there is a fairly nice selection of free books that you can get that you can just read when you're bored and you don't have a book on you! As we all know, Winnie The Pooh by A. A. Milne (but not the sequel) is available for free (and I'm a huge Winnie The Pooh fan, seriously :D), but there are also some other good books like Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol and The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm having fun! :P (Though I do like to make fun of the large number of names I recognize in the free list from Social Studies class like Adam Smith and Karl Marx and John Locke, lol :P)

Orientation Lock This is very useful. If you're laying down and you want to read your iPod, but it keeps changing orientation, what do you do? Double press the home button, swipe to the left and tap the lock button! Now it's locked in portrait mode! :D It's very useful, but one thing that annoys me a bit is that you can only lock in portrait mode, not landscape. Meh.

Folders Folders are pretty cool. I have so much more space now! :P And it's pretty cool, if you put two apps that have a number on them (like notifications) in one folder, the folder will have a number that is the sum of the numbers inside it! WOW I COULD HAVE WORDED THAT BETTER! :P One thing that annoys me, though, is that the icons for the folders are a bit ugly. It's just a black square with smaller versions of the contained icons. It could've looked better, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway, enough about iOS 4. It's quite awesome and I look forward to my favorite apps coming out with multitasking ability, but there's something else I have to rant about. Remember yesterday when I told a story about how I had to maintain an old version of iTunes on my virtual machine so I could sync my iPod? And how I thought that iOS 4 was out because iTunes 9.2 was out? Yeah, I have come to realize exactly what iTunes 9.2 does, and the thought did cross my mind sometime yesterday, but I dismissed it, hoping that it wasn't true.

It was true. You need iTunes 9.2 to be able to sync with iOS 4. Ouch. Anyway, I have been spending a horribly long time converting my VirtualBox virtual machine to a VMWare one and IT WORKED. iTunes 9.2 worked! I don't know exactly what's wrong with VirtualBox (and I did like it better, VMWare seems a bit slow to me), but I am happy that I can now sync my iPod.

One last thing. While I am happy that I can now sync with iTunes, I did mention yesterday that I would be very happy if I could sync with Banshee. Well, guess what! Someone spent a week hacking Banshee and apparently got libgpod to work, which includes iPhone/iPod touch support! WOOT! It's not out yet, but you can read about it here: http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/2010/06/hackweek-v.html. I hope it comes out soon and that it's as awesome as possible! :)

Well, at least not at the time of writing this post. Which is about 10:30am EST. And I'm not really insulting iOS 4, I just think it's been a bit overhyped and some new revelations have really diminished it's wonder for me.

First, I want to start by writing about the horrific time I had trying to upgrade to the firmware that I thought came out already. I know, I should have read more into it, but I was excited for some of the new anticipated features. Anyway, this story needs a bit of an introduction. I have been an iPod user for about three years now and although I remain apathetic towards Apple, I do have one huge complaint: there is no version of iTunes available for Linux.

While this is a major inconvenience for me, I have been able to survive for a while. While I had my second iPod, a yellow Chromatic which I loved (rest in peace), I had to restart the computer and endure Windows Vista's mind-numbing slowness if I wanted to add a single song to my iPod, which is why I generally added songs in batch, which grew pretty annoying because I would then have to wait to be able to listen to a song (I'm obsessed with play counts, please help me). Anyway, I finally became sick of this and tried some Linux media players that have claimed to be able to sync with iPods.

Rhythmbox made me sick. It really did. I just did not like it at all, and half the time I listened to a song, it wouldn't scrobble to Last.fm (again, I'm obsessed, keel me). Next, I tried Banshee which I eventually fell in love with. It was smooth, sleek and worked very well. However, I don't know if I ever managed to sync my iPod with it because my iPod died right around then. It was very odd, the buttons just stopped working while the rest of the iPod clearly worked because shaking it skipped to a random song.

Anyway, I eventually got an iPod touch two weeks ago and while I do love it, I needed to find somewhere to sync it. Banshee wouldn't work for two reasons: it had no iPod touch/iPhone support (even for music) and I wanted to be able to have apps. Eventually, I realized that a virtual machine would probably work perfectly and so I downloaded VirtualBox and set up an installation of Windows XP in it. It was all fine and dandy until I installed iTunes and it crashed every time I tried to open it. What?!?! It turns out that versions of iTunes 9.0.3 and up do not work in VirtualBox. There was a workaround, though, install iTunes 9.0.2 instead, and I did and it worked perfectly. And for the last two weeks, I've been running 9.0.2 and syncing with my iPod touch peacefully (except for one incident in which I accidentally updated iTunes and had to downgrade again and re-import all of my music, but that was before I got my iPod touch).

My problem was probably the deceitful early release of iTunes 9.2. I immediately assumed that it meant that iOS 4 was out as well, because, well, it made sense! Anyway, I stupidly tried to update my copy of iTunes and what do you know, it starts crashing. So I had to spend an hour downgrading, re-importing and then re-syncing because of course, iTunes didn't recognize my iPod after I reinstalled it. And I have 600+ songs, so that took quite a while. Anyway, when that was finally done, I restarted to my Windows partition and planned to use the iTunes there not to sync, but just to update. Lo and behold, iOS 4 WASN'T OUT YET. I think I started talking to the computer at that point "WHAT DO YOU MEAN 3.1.3 IS THE CURRENT UPDATE? I THINK YOU'RE WRONG. YOU ARE WRONG. I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG."

Anyway, that's my story about trying to upgrade to a not-yet-available firmware, now let's talk about how iOS 4's new feature lineup may be a bit misleading. Let's start with the big one: MULTITASKING. Probably the most anticipated feature of iOS 4 is the ability to run more than one app at once, a feature which most other mobile devices have had as a stable since forever.

Well, let's get something straight here: it's not really multitasking. Apple introduced seven new features that make it seem like more than app is running at a time, but they're really not.

1. First, background music. Apps can choose to keep playing audio once you've switched to another app, something that the iPod app has had forever. This allows you to do something like play a song on Pandora while doing something else: Pandora isn't really still open when you switch to another app, it's audio is just still playing.
2. Second, background VoIP. For most people, that means Skype. This one I find a bit confusing because it's fairly specific, but basically it means that you can continue a VoIP call even when in another application.
3. Third, background location, which I'm not even sure I understand, so I'm going to skip that one. Read about it yourself.
4. Fourth, push notifications, which allow popup notifications to be sent to your iPod while doing other things. Don't be fooled, however, this has been out since iPhone OS 3.
5. Fifth, local notifications, which are basically push notifications that don't rely on Apple's servers. I don't really understand this one either, but dun kill me, I have more to rant about.
6. Sixth, task finishing, which allows a task that you have started in an app, such as uploading a photo to Flickr, to even while you aren't in that app. Really, that app isn't open anymore, it's just offloaded a task to a background process. This one scares me a bit because you never know if an app has task finishing enabled or not and you could potentiality cancel an task you didn't mean to by switching apps, thinking that it'll still continue working.
7. Finally, the most deceitful of them all, fast app switching, which allows apps to save where they are when you close them so that they start right back where they were when you open them again. Really, when you close the app, it is closed and nothing else is being done, unless something was offloaded to task finishing, it's just that when you open the app again, it remembers where it was.

All of this put together really isn't multitasking, it's just a facsimile that looks a bit like multitasking on the outside. While this is probably good enough for most people, there is one more rather huge catch when it comes to iOS 4 multitasking:

Applications have to have multitasking features enabled.

When we all upgrade to iOS 4 in a few hours when it gets released (my bet is noon PST, which is 3pm here), not every app is suddenly going to have these seven multitasking-like features. Developers have to add these features to their apps using new APIs and then re-submit them to the App Store. So unless the author of your favorite app is reasonable and committed, you ain't gettin' multitasking. In fact, I've already heard that not only is the new Facebook app hideous, the developers have neglected to update it for iOS 4. How do you like dem apples? Not that much, thanks.

Anyway, hopefully iOS 4 will come out later today and I will get it and hopefully multitasking won't be as horrible as it sounds. And I'll write another post about the things I do like about it. Yeah, right. No, seriously. :P