iPhone users always had a thing for Flashlight apps. Way before the iPhone 4 came out with its LED flash, iPhone 3G and 3GS users used to install apps that turned the screen white and allowed them to see in the dark. Of course the iPhone 4 makes things simpler by allowing developers to access the LED Flash APIs and develop real Flashlight apps.

Too bad many of these apps are paid apps. Available for free in Cydia, SpringFlash is the first iPhone 4-only Cydia app that lets you turn the LED flash on / off with a simple Activator gesture. Mine is tap on volume heads up display.

Useful.

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“

(Via MacStories » news.)

Icebird: Best New Twitter Client for iPhone.: ”

Right after Twitter announced the acquisition of the popular Tweetie app from Atebits’ Loren Brichter, many third party developers of Twitter clients started complaining that Twitter just killed the platform by entering the market itself. We may have different positions on this, but that’s not the point.

Point is, there are lots of developers out there who don’t care about ‘the big names’, they just want to keep developing for the sake of it and for the user base they’ve managed to build. I respect these guys. There’s a problem though: what about those that come up with new apps now? It shouldn’t be easy, knowing that you’re just getting started and Twitter is about to release the best mobile Twitter client ever made…for free. It’s a difficult situation, but fortunately there are some developers who love challenges and are releasing their apps anyway.

Meet Icebird, a new Twitter client for iPhone which I’m falling in love with.

Icebird is an application I’ve been following  for some weeks now, it’s developed by Fabian Kreiser and it finally got approved tonight. I woke up and found the app in the App Store, waiting for me to try it. It comes at $3.99 in the App Store, and that might sound a little bit pricey. I think it’s worth the money though, especially if you’re always living on the edge, trying new software and believing in new apps. If so, you’ve got to try Icebird.

Icebird is focused on simplicity and ease to use. It sports a great icon, an elegant interface and support for multiple accounts. Thank God it also allows you to quote tweets and doesn’t come only with native retweets (yeah, I’m looking at you, Twitterrific). I had to mention this, as it is a feature many users ask before purchasing an application for Twitter. Like I said, the icon looks great – which is good because you want to keep it on the first page of the home screen just to look at it. If you’re into well designed interfaces, you know what I’m talking about. When you fire up the application for the first time you’ll be asked to enter the credentials for your Twitter account, and the login screen is nice too. Once you’ve logged in with your account you’ll be presented with the main screen of Icebird, let’s call it the Dashboard.

Here you can navigate through your account, much like Osfoora lets you do. I think that Icebird realization is better than Osfoora’s, as it’s cleaner and minimal. I like it, and swiping left and right to access all the configured accounts is a real pleasure. I also liked the possibility to tap on the triangle at the bottom to bring up the settings and trends: it’s unobtrusive and it’s there when you need it. From the dashboard you can access your timeline, mentions, messages (threaded), lists, favorite tweets and search for tweets or people.  Also from the same screen, the inbox button in the top left corner is nothing but drafts support, which makes Icebird a perfect replacement to Birdhouse too.

The timeline view is simple and well designed, and it somehow reminds me of the good & old Birdfeed. Tweets are in the shape of bubbles (just take a look at the screens) and have different colors depending on their nature of simple timeline tweets, mentions or your tweets. Mentions are yellow-ish, tweets are white and your own tweets are green. Also in the timeline Icebird feature the always-good ‘Pull down to refresh’ command, and I appreciate it. It’s become natural for me to use this gesture, which I think every other Twitter app should implement now. But how do you interact with tweets? Remember, Icebird is geared towards simplicity, and things are kept as simple as possible here. There’s no Tweetie-like swipe on tweet menu. There’s popup menu that should appear on screen if you hold a tweet, but there’s a minor bug which doesn’t let me tap on it. Perhaps it’s just OS 4.0’s fault. If you want to do stuff with tweets, you have to tap on them. This opens the single tweet view screen, which is pretty similar to Tweetie 2 and allows you to perform many actions including faving the tweet, reply to the author, quote it and retweet it, show conversation if it’s a reply and even copy the link or forward tweet as reply. Very nice. Unfortunately there’s no support for Instapaper, but I can see that coming with an update.

If you, however, decide to tap on the author pic you’ll see another screen, the profile view, which contains a lot of stuff as well. Besides description, user avatar, followers and following (which you can browse!), you can see all the tweets from that person, mentions, favorites and lists. You can follow, unfollow and add to a list. I found myself enjoying a lot navigating through users, then see followers and tap on another user’s profile. This is deep navigation, and we like it.

When it comes to tweeting, Icebird is simple again. You can enable geo location, tap on the user button to choose a follower to mention, select a picture. There’s no URL shortening support or other features, and while this might be ok to keep the app straightforward, I’m pretty sure some basic elements will be implemented soon.

Last, Icebird suprised me for its speed (it’s seriously fast, both in animations and refreshing tweets) and for the fact that it perfectly remembers where you left it the last time. Going back to Icebird feels like multitasking.

I’m definitely in love with Icebird. It feels fresh, stable, fast, it’s a pleasure to tap around, reply to people and find new users. And it the developer is gonna add that small features I’ve mentioned above it will be perfect to me. But anyway, it just feels right. Is it better than Tweetie? Sure it’s different. And on the iPhone, I needed something like this.

You can download Icebird here. Welcome to my home screen.

Be sure to follow MacStories on Twitter.

”

(Via MacStories » news.)

iPhone 4 Jailbreak!! Released!!!!: “

Jailbreak iOS 4x OS 3x ALL iDevices JailbreakMe

Wow, jail breaking the iPhone and iPod touch is way easier then ever before.

Hackers hdm/metasploit, kroo, dinopio, rezn, drudge, pumpkin, davidc, dunham, and NerveGas just setup and ‘instant’ jailbreak for the iPhone and iPod Touch simply by going to a website.

Simply go to JailbreakMe.com from your iPhone and follow the instructions. Really you can’t go wrong with that.

Comex has done a great job by reviving JailbreakMe and bringing back the browser-based jailbreak to the iPhone.

JailbreakMe will work for every iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad starting at iOS 3.1.2. That means that if your iDevice is at 3.1.2 or newer, then you’re good.

“

(Via AppleDDL.net.)

How to Backup iOS 4 SHSH blobs for iPhone 4:
“

Saurik developed a great way to get your signature files in Cydia regardless of the firmware you are running, but it requires a jailbroken phone. Apple is almost ready to release iOS 4.01 while iOS 4.1 is distributed to developers, on the other side iPhone Dev team achieved a full jailbreak and unlock of iPhone 4 iOS 4. So it is highly recommended to save your SHSH, so you can downgrade back to iOS 4 any time. Since iOS 4 jailbreak isn’t public at the moment you can save your iOS 4 SHSH with Firmware Umbrella. Well, here is how to get them.

Why i need ECID SHSH Dump ? Apple added a new piece of security called ECID, The nature of iPad / iPhone 3GS / iPod Touch 3G / iPhone 4 hardware allows Apple to stop IPSWs from being usable unless you’ve already gotten the signed chunks they send to you based on your ECID (a unique chip ID). Actually Apple applies ECID so the iDevice will refuse to accept the ipsw file while downgrading because of a bad signature. It will treat it as a custom ipsw without having the apple server sign the ipsw specifically for your phone id before flashing.

Note : This procedure allows you to save your precious SHSH blobs on your PC/Mac so you can save them forever. You must have your SHSH saved on Saurik server by hitting the make my life easier button on home page of Cydia. If you already saved your SHSH on Saurik server you needn’t to repeat the process every time.

!! it is very important to keep doing this for every firmware version that comes out after these !!

Windows:

1. Get your ECID following this instructions: How to Grab iPad ECID on Windows and Mac

2. Download firmware umbrella thefirmwareumbrella, place on desktop.

3. Now put your iDevice in recovery mode.

4. Open umbrella.exe with administrator privileges, and it’ll automatically detect your iDevice, tick on advanced options and enter your ECID number and hit the reset button (this will request the shsh signature from APPLE and save it to your PC)

5. By doing this you will save your shsh copy in the same directory where the umbrella.exe file is, copy it and rejoice, for you have your own 64kb gold with you.

Mac:

1. Get your ECID following this instructions: How to Grab iPad ECID on Windows and Mac

2. Get firmware umbrella  thefirmwareumbrella, move the Umbrella app OUT of the .dmg file preferably onto your desktop.

3. Now put your iDevice in recovery mode.

4. Launch umbrella app, and it’ll automatically detect your iDevice, tick on advanced options and enter your ECID number, select the location to Apple and hit the reset button (this will request the shsh signature from APPLE and save it to your Mac)

4. By doing this you will save your shsh copy in the same directory where the umbrella.app file is, copy it and rejoice, for you have your own 64kb gold with you.

Special thanks to FirmwareUmbrella for developing and maintaining such a wonderful application.

Stay tuned with us for your daily dose of iPhone news, you can follow us on twitter @ihackinjosh You can also subscribe to our daily free e-mail news letter and keep your self updated with the latest of iPhone community.

“

(Via iHackintosh.)

This is a simple step-by-step procedure and shall be used on a jailbroken iPhone; if you have a virgin one I think there is a tool to extract sms.db out of iTunes backup, when you have this file you can go on from Step 2.

Step 1 – transfer the file sms.db in your PC:

This step is quite easy but you have to install on your PC the program WinSCP or any other Secure FTP (SFTP) program. Some SSH clients have this addon application. You have to connect to your iphone via Wi-Fi, so your PC and the iPhone have to be on the same area, connected on the same network.

To discover the ip address you can go in general settings / network / wifi proprerties, or you can run Terminal on you iPhone (if you have installed this application) and run ifconfig, the address is the one near “inet” word.

You have to find the file Llibrary/SMS.app/sms.db or /var/mobile/Library/SMS.app/sms.db and copy it somewhere in your PC.

Step 2 – convert from sms.db to out.txt (ascii comma-delimited text file)

To do this conversion you have to download in the above directory the SQLite3 client from here.

Then open DOS Prompt, go in the directory where you placed sqlite3.exe and sms.db and type exatly this text (don’t forget the semicolon after message). Mind that this is case-sensitive!

sqlite3 sms.d
.output out.txt 
SELECT * FROM message; 
.quit

That’s all: in your out.txt file you have your sms, in a readable format.

Step 3 – Import your sms in an Excel / spreadsheet, useful to convert date/time field in an human readable format

Run Excel, open the file out.txt. Excel will ask you if it’s a delimited file or a fixed length. Chose delimited and insert a “pipe” symbol ( | ) in the “custom” separator at the end of the list.

Click ok and your file should be correctly imported.

Add a new column after column C.

In D1 cell (should be empty as you added freshly) cut&paste this text:

=C1/86400+25569+(0,04166*(2-G1)) don’t forget “=” at the beginning of the string. Format this cell as custom, typing: dd/mm/yyyy h.mm.ss (for italian users: gg/mm/aaaa h.mm.ss

You should read the converted date&time. Now click on this D1 cell, type CTRL+C then select the D1 column and type CTRL+V to spread this conversion for all your SMSes.

In column F, 2 means Received, 3 means Sent, 0 means Unread.

Column G: contains the clock correction in hours, this is used in D formula so don’t remove this column.

If you discover the meaning of the other columns, let me know, thanks!

Via: http://preda.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/move-your-sms-from-iphone/

http://www.ihackintosh.com/2010/06/guide-to-jailbreak-iphone-3gs-ios-4-with-pwnage-tool/

Download the app at: http://supercrazyawesome.com/

• Extracting application resources for developers to help them investigate bugs.
• Exploring files that are created by third party applications using Finder.
• Decoding the SQLite database files that are stored on the iPhone / iPod Touch, such as Call History, SMS messages, and Notes.

Download the app at: http://supercrazyawesome.com/

Extract SHSH Blobs For iOS4 Devices [How To]: “

If you’re going to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad, the first thing you MUST do is backup your device’s SHSH blobs. With the release of iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch G3, Apple added an extra layer of security to prevent hacking, jailbreaking and unlocking. Apple is constantly closing the exploits used by jailbreak hackers by updating the [...]

(Via Cult of Mac.)

NotifyMe v2 brings some ‘Awesome’ with iOS 4’s Arrival: “

NotifyMe is a nifty little app for your iPhone (and iPod touch) that uses Apple’s Push Notification Service to alert or remind you of tasks. Unlike all the advanced Todo apps and Task managers on the App Store today, NotifyMe’s feature list is pretty simple. But that’s the beauty of it. It does one thing, but does it quite well. The app has been around for quite some time now, and was doing quite well on the App Store charts. The developers have just released version 2 of the app that brings in a bunch of changes and improvements.

When you first launch the app, you’re prompted to create a user account on their servers. This registers your device for Push Notifications and also enables you to use their web app (We’ll talk about it later down below). Once you’re done setting up the account, you’re presented the app’s main screen (although you can configure what screen you want to be placed on when the app launches), that lists your upcoming, recent and completed tasks.

At the bottom of the screen, you have options to create two kinds of new reminders:

1. Push Reminders

Push reminders are NotifyMe’s ability to make use of Apple’s Push Notification System to deliver the reminder to your device. With this, you get some advanced options like Custom repeating patterns, access to the NotifyMeCloud web app, Sharing reminders with friends & family, Pre-alerts and auto-snoozing.

2. Local Reminders

Local Reminders take advantage of the local notifications API of iOS 4.0. With these, you can create reminders even when you don’t have network coverage and NotifyMe will still alert you on time. Pretty slick. However, Local Reminders lack all the advanced options I mentioned above.

New Reminders

Setting up a reminder is as easy as peeling a banana. Tap any of the two options, give your reminder a name, set the time you want to be alerted, set how often you want that to be repeated, select a Category for that reminder (or leave the default ‘Todo’), set an optional Pre-alert and you’re done. NotifyMe automatically syncs the new reminders back to the NotifyMe cloud. There’re also options for setting the snooze and adding a note to each reminder.

One major shortcomings of the app when it first launched was that it assumed a Task as done when the reminder was triggered. With v2, there’s a Snooze option added that will continue reminding you until your manually mark a Task as done. This has come as a huge relief for me, because I’m not always on my toes to finish a task and people around me know me for my lazy attitude.

Depending on what options you set the reminder with, you’ll be notified at the set time, even if the app is not running. The app appends (Pre-alert) or (Autosnooze) to the reminder when it notifies you. The app ships with a few nice melodies, but unfortunately doesn’t let you use your own.

The NotifyMeCloud

As mentioned above, NotifyMe syncs all the data back to the cloud. Powerybase has built a simple web app at http://webapp.notifymecloud.com/ to overview and manage your reminders. You can also add new notifications here, which are then synced back to the app when you launch it. And since you registered the device for Push Notifications when you registered for an account, even if the app is not running, you’ll still be alerted for any new reminders you add through the web app. And all this works pretty well.

Sharing and Friends

NotifyMe has introduced an interesting feature with this version. Called ‘Sharing and Friends’, this feature lets you add (authorize) other people to share your reminders with. So you can add your roommate or your wife, who also have the app on their devices, so that you can share some tasks to their own devices. Similarly, your friends can share tasks with you and you will be alerted at the same time. However, the task is also locally created on your own device among your other alerts. I’d have loved to see a way of assigning a task to someone, without it being created on your own device.

iPad Control Center

The developers are currently working on a native iPad app they’re dubbing iPad Control Center. Unlike the iPhone apps, this app will let you manage multiple accounts (Like multiple devices in the same household). Each authorized account will be protected by a passcode, so all the family members can manage their accounts from a single iPad in the house. This is still being developed and is not currently available on the store.

For those who are impressed by NotifyMe and its features and want to dive right in, the app is available on the App Store for $5.99. However, there’s also a ‘Simple’ version available on the store, that is essentially NotifyMe 2, minus the Cloud. NotifyMe 2 Simple features only local notifications support, but misses out on Cloud Syncing and the ‘Sharing’ feature. It’s still a great app if you want simple daily reminders. NotifyMe Simple costs $2.99 on the store.

Both the apps have been done remarkably well and I’ve found enough reasons to ditch Things, at least till they introduce OTA syncing. NotifyMe 2 is simple and just works, which is what I like about it. I’d highly recommend you go through their website.

Qu-s – Notes with features to structure your ideas on your desktop.

“

(Via Smoking Apples.)