Available In: Cydia

Price: Free

GeoHot, the developer who brought us the purplera1n jailbreak, has released his iPhone 3GS unlock, purplesn0w. Below is what he has to say about purplesn0w and instructions on how to install it. You can view the original post HERE. This unlock is said to fix Wi-Fi, Battery and Unlock failing issues experienced with the ultrasn0w unlock.

Note: This unlock is different than the unlock released by the Dev-Team (ultrasn0w).

Wifi fails? Battery fails? Unlock fails? You need purplesn0w, the geohot 3GS unlock solution. Now I know you here a lot about different colors of sn0w, but I’m here to tell you why purplesn0w is the best. First off, what is purplesn0w? It’s a soft unlock for your 3GS that I’d actually use day to day. It’s not a daemon that takes any resources, and it doesn’t add a task to your baseband. It’s very close to a true unlock. All it does is patch three files, CommCenter, lockdownd, and your wildcard activation plist (which you need, activate w at&t sim first, no hacktivation support yet). That’s it, no other files are installed. Props to Oranav for the at+xlog exploit!

A full explanation is coming soon, but I think you clever reversers out there will see what it does, and see why it’s so pristine The payload is radically different from other varieties of sn0w. beta as usual, back up first.

Instructions:
- Be sure to have legit activated 3GS
- Disable 3G if you don’t have it (like T-Mobile).
- Add apt.geohot.com to Cydia
- Install com.geohot.purplesn0w
- Watch for success output in Cydia
- Reboot, and enjoy your unlocked iPhone

ScreenShots

the iPhone DEV team has released redsn0w software which is a simple to use MAC and PC software, similar to QuickPwn, which will jailbreak and unlock iPhone 3.0 software (limitations apply, read notes below).

As of right now here is what you can and cannot do with redsn0w. Read carefully before using redsn0w!

iPhone 1st Generation
Everything! redsn0w will both unlock and jailbreak your 1st generation iPhone. It will install Cydia and will be able to change SIM Cards to a different carrier. This is only for 1st gen iPhone users.

iPhone 3G
redsn0w can only jailbreak your iPhone 3G, but not unlock it. This means you can get Cydia but you won’t be able to use another carrier with a different SIM Card. If you to unlock your iPhone 3G with the new 3.0 firmware, you should wait for ultrasn0w which is coming soon. As a side note, yellowsn0w is able to unlock older 2.x firmwares of the iPhone 3G.

iPhone 3G S
Nothing! Unfortunately, redsn0w can neither jailbreak nor unlock the iPhone 3G S. Wait for ultrasn0w.

iPod touch
redsn0w will jailbreak both 1st generation iPod Touch and 2nd generation iPod Touch.

To use redsn0w simply upgrade iTunes to 8.2, the device in iTunes to firmware version 3.0 and run redsn0w to activate and jailbreak the device (and if you are using an original iPhone 2G, it will unlock it too!)

Official Torrents
redsn0w for MAC
redsn0w for PC

Other files you will need:

iTunes 8.2

Bootloader files V3.9 (BL-39.bin) and V4.6 (BL-46.bin)

Firmware 3.0 for your Device
iPhone 3G S Firmware 3.0
iPhone 3G Firmware 3.0
iPhone 2G Firmware 3.0
iPod Touch 2G Firmware 3.0
iPod Touch 1G Firmware 3.0

Here is a video demo of using redsn0w on the iPhone with Windows

Use iPhone mods and hacks at your own risk! Installing 3rd Party iPhone apps requires you to jailbreak the iPhone before installing the native software and apps. Browse the full list of all iPhone and iPod touch native 3rd party apps filed under the software category.

More info on redsn0w here

The iPhone Dev Team has got us excited (and Apple worried) by announcing they have a fully-working software carrier unlock ready for the 3.0 firmware ahead of its official release.

On Tuesday evening they will do a live demo of the new yellowsn0w carrier unlock working on official 3.0 firmware, just before the big Apple release. While jailbreaking is already possible on 3.0, this is good news for would-be unlockers with an iPhone 3G, though those going for the 3GS will have to wait a bit longer. [DevTeamBlog via TheModShop—Thanks, Dylan!]

Sofortbild is the second cheap alternative to a Nikon product we have seen this week. It is a piece of software with which to tether your Nikon DSLR, and it’s free. Why shoot tethered? There are lots of reasons, including the ability to remote control the camera and to almost instantly display your pictures on the big screen as you take them.

Sofortbild (which translates roughly as Instant Picture) doesn’t offer all the features of Nikon’s Camera Control software, but it adds a few things you won’t find in Nikon’s version, such as shooting a bracketed range of pictures and generating an HDR (high dynamic range) image from them. There is also GPS support and a rather nice HUD-style panel to show the metadata. In fact, the entire application wins in terms of interface — Nikon’s software products seem to be designed with a real hatred for the user.

You don’t get to use live view, which is a shame — it’s nice to see a live, full screen feed from the camera, and you can’t control as much as you can with the Nikon software, but it’s free, and Nikon Capture Control cost $180. That alone makes it worth a download.

Product page [Sofortbild]

Ripdev’s InstallerApp makes installing third-party jailbreak applications on your iPhone slightly easier, by eliminating the need to jailbreak your iPhone at all. You just need to pay $7 for the privilege.

The process works by installing an app onto your iPhone that's not quite jailbreaking, but is enough to allow those not-quite-official applications to get on there. If you gave us the choice of paying $7 or running jailbreak on our phones—which is fairly easy as long as you have some tech knowledge—we'd choose real jailbreak. [Ripdev via 9 to 5 Mac]

The iPhone 3G unlock is now available. The unlocking software is called yellowsn0w, runs as an invisible application, and it’s very easy to install. Here’s how. Updated 3: Now works for me with 0.9.4.

Yellowsn0w, the iPhone 3G unlock, runs as a small command line application that gets installed in any jailbroken iPhone 3G using Installer. It’s very easy to install:

• First, update your iPhone 3G to the latest iPhone OS provided by Apple using the latest iTunes.

• Then, use QuickPwn 2.2 to jailbreak and activate your iPhone 3G. If you have Mac OS X 10.5.6 installed, you should follow these instructions before doing it.

• Use Installer or Cydia to install yellowsn0w, which is completely free. Here are the addresses you have to use to add yellowsn0w to your installer application:

For Cydia enter: http://apt9.yellowsn0w.com/
For Installer enter: http://i.yellowsn0w.com/

• That’s it. There are some special SIM cards that give problems, but f you have a normal SIM card from any non-official carrier, you are fine.

BEWARE: This is a beta application—version 0.9.1— so install at your own risk—I’m installing, it, though. Since it’s a daemon which doesn’t alter anything permanently, it seems safe. Just proceed with caution and be warned.

Update: I’ve been trying to get this to run all day. The installation is very easy. Getting it to work right is a completely different matter.

After reboot, the iPhone won’t pick my Vodafone carrier (the Vodafone SIM card works fine in an iPhone first generation, unlocked with the old unlock). It will just sit there, idle. Won’t give any error, but it won’t connect to the carrier network.

My iPhone 3G has the 2.28 baseband, as it should, and has been Quickpwned for the first time to do the unlock. Installer and Cydia are there, working fine. I’ve carefully followed the instructions in their page—about getting out the SIM card for a minute, then get it back in (and all other possible combinations)—but it just won’t fly.

Like they say, this is beta. It won’t damage your iPhone—in theory—but it may or may not run. It seems like there are other reports of the same, as well as other people talking about losing the network connection.

Even while this is labeled as a beta, it saddens me that the iPhone Dev Team has embraced the damn beta culture just to make the release on a cute date. It looks like the old days of solid versions are long gone by.

Update 2: There’s a poll here with people saying if it works or not. At the time of this writing, these were the stats:

It worked: 23 34.33%
It doesn’t work: 44 65.67%
Voters: 67.

Hopefully, a more stable and predictable release will come soon. Until then, I will keep trying. If you have any reports, drop me a line via email.

Update 3: iPhone Dev Team has released version 0.9.4. After some magic moves in the terminal, it worked for me. My iPhone 3G is now working in Spain in the Vodafone network. [IPhone Dev Team]

The first and last time I’ll cut and paste a press release on this blog. Casey Reas writes:

We’ve just posted Processing 1.0 at http://processing.org/download. We’re so excited about it, we even took time to write a press release.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. – November 24, 2008 – The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency – and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features – the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Whups! That’s not the right one. Here we go:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Extremely well done and congratulations to all involved!

The iPod touch may in fact be the “Funnest iPod Ever”, as recent ads claim. Games like Spore Origins and Cro-Mag Rally that embrace the device’s unique (and frustrating) controls are certainly amusing time-wasters.

It’s not necessarily true, however, that being the most amusing iPod also makes it the “best portable device for gaming”, as Steve Jobs has claimed. One thing it lacks, when compared to dedicated platforms like the DS and the PSP, is game variety. Developer ZodTTD hopes to help broaden the scope of iPhone/iPod touch gaming by bringing popular FPS Quake to the platform.

To date most iPhone/iPod touch games have been puzzle and casual titles, with some notable (and successful) exceptions like RPG port Vay. The platform has yet to see many offerings that appeal to core gamers. Reviews for more ambitious games like Kroll and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed reveal that while players are impressed with the hardware capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch, titles to date have not been living up to their full potential in terms of gameplay quality and longevity. If it is accepted by Apple (it was submitted by the developer last week), a working version of Quake on the iPhone would go a long way towards proving to core gamers that the device is a true contender to established rivals like Sony and Nintendo.

According to the developer, Quake will be a free download for all iPhone and iPod touch users. Controls are screen-based, as accelerometer control was found to be unwieldy and unsuited to Quake gameplay. The game is played in landscape mode and features full audio support. ZodTTD also makes the ambitious claim that future releases will include network play, downloadable mods and additional content. The reason for Quake’s original success was due largely to its multiplayer mode and customizability. It’ll be interesting to see if these same features will make it a hit on the iPhone/iPod touch as well.

View the original post by ZodTTD and actual gameplay footage here.

I recently set up a Mac mini in my living room to act as a media server. Instead of trying to update separate music libraries every time I added songs to my collection, I was just adding the music to the Mac mini’s iTunes library and streaming it my laptop. That worked fine until I tried to sync my iPhone. For obvious (copyright) reasons you cannot sync an iPhone to a shared library.

I wanted access to my music on both machines, but I did not want to share my Macbook Air’s library because the laptop would have to be on with iTunes running for the Mac mini to have the music. At this point, I had to choose between running separate libraries and updating them independently or figure out a way to run one library that updated whenever I added music from either machine. I chose the latter of the two options.
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I used iChat for a while and, although it’s a great program and has the ability to be used with most of the major chat interfaces, I got frustrated with the lack of built in customizable features very quickly. I never took the time to download a new client or find a way to add features to iChat itself, but the other day I was reading a forum that mentioned Chax.

Chax is a freeware application that puts iChat on steriods without the added rage. The install is simple and clean and adds a new tab in the preferences window of iChat entitled “Chax.”

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