iOS4 Review from a non-Jailbreak User

As mentioned in last week’s podcast, one of our listeners- Luke- sent in a nice little review of iOS4 from the standpoint of someone without a jailbroken device. He’s given his approval for us to post it here for the rest of you to read (since it was a bit long to read in the episode itself), so here it is: Read more »

Jailbreaking the 3GS to iOS 4: Avoid AptBackup!

So, over the last few days I went through the process of preparing for and jailbreaking my 3GS to iOS 4. Unfortunately, there isn’t as simple of a method as there was with the ones last time like Blackra1n or Spirit, so it required a return to the old ‘create a custom upgrade package and restore from it’ method using the Dev Team’s PwnageTool. A bit annoying since this requires a good bit more time AND risk in what can go wrong, but on the whole not entirely too bad.

The actual upgrade/jailbreak process went fairly easily, though the guide I was following wrongly stated to put the phone into DFU mode instead of the Recovery mode that you actually should be using. I was able to restore from the custom .ipsw without real incident, and soon had a 3GS running iOS 4 with Cydia on the springboard. But- that’s where things went very wrong.

Since I had a whole lot of Jailbreak stuff on the device, I decided to use AptBackup to archive everything and then re-load it onto the device once the upgrade was done. Now, the last time I did this- when giong from 2.X to 3.0- this caused me a whole lot of grief, and resulted in my having to basically completely restore the phone. Twice. But, I figured this was a fluke so gave it a shot again- and ended up in largely the same boat.

After loading all the packages onto the phone, immediately upon booting up the phone would go into MobileSubstrate ‘Safe Mode’- meaning one of the extensions/apps had crashed badly. So, I started uninstalling Cydia apps to try and find the offending one. Eventually, I got down to it and just uninstalled MobileSubstrate and all the apps that relied upon it. At which point, when the phone rebooted, it was working just fine- but I had nothing on my Springboard except for the Cydia apps and the stock ones that the phone comes with. ALL of my App Store-downloaded apps were not showing up. iTunes was still showing them as being there- but in the listing of the things on the phone, they were lumped into ‘other’ so I had like 20GB of ‘other’.

After doing everything else I could think of to no avail, I eventually simply restored the phone from the custom .ipsw again and let it re-install from the backup made right before the jailbreak process, after which it has been running just fine.

Now- to be fair, this likely is not AptBackup’s fault itself. The problem most likely is that one of the packages/dependencies installed messed things up- and that it installs a whole mess of things at once likely makes it all the worse. So, if you’re going to upgrade to Jailbroken iOS 4, I heavily recommend avoiding AptBackup and simply write down all of the Cydia apps/utilities that you make use of and then installing them individually to ensure that there aren’t any problems- some of them likely aren’t updated to be compatible with iOS 4, and by loading them up individually through Cydia you’ll likely be alerted to this.

Key Ring Reward Cards Scanning Confirmed

Just a quick post to follow-up the actual episode’s posting. This morning I got the chance to try using Key Ring Reward Cards with a handheld barcode scanner- and it actually worked! It’s a bit disappointing that it doesn’t apparently work with the self-checkouts that I most commonly use, but it’s great to have confirmation that you can scan it with more modern handheld scanners elsewhere.

Delay of Game

Due to both of us being out of town over the weekend and travel delays, this week’s episode isn’t going to be recorded until Tuesday night and will likely be up sometime on Wednesday. We’re sorry for the delay! This week’s core topic will be a discussion in response to a reader email about whether the coming changes in 4.0 will eliminate the need for jailbreaking.

The Appcast #59: March 27th, 2010- No-Core-Topic-Core-Topic

This week’s show: The No-Core  Topic Core Topic. This week found Bob doing the podcast on his own and unable to properly prepare a core topic on his own, so he simply picked a few more notable apps to talk about in its place.

USB Drive: Use your Jailbroken device as a normal USB memory stick, with some caveats

Since the iPhones (and their cousins iPod Touches…) were first released, one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from those who have them (myself included) is that unlike the previous iPods Apple had released, the iPhone could not be used as a USB drive to store and transfer files. Even with the advent of jailbreaking, all of the solutions to this that I’ve found up until now have required that you have iTunes on the device- something that isn’t feasible for people like me whose work computers are solidly locked down such that iTunes cannot be installed on it (and even if it could be installed, there would be trouble if there were an audit of the computers). USB Drive from Dmytro is the first true solution to use the iPhone (or presumably a similarly jailbroken Touch) as an honest-to-goodness USB storage device.
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Pastefire expands app/service capabilities

We got an email earlier today from the folks who developed the Pastefire application letting us know about the new features that they’ve added to the app and improvements they’ve added to the service in general. Of greatest interest to me is the fact that the ‘copy zone’ has been expanded out to a full 999 characters, making it a much more useful service for me to type things up on the computer for posting to blocked sites via the iPhone.

The newest version also adds push notifications and the ability to specify to automatically launch some features (like sending mail or SMS) via the transferred content. Full details can be found on the Pastefire page and on the Appsfire Blog.

And just to prove how useful this actually is- this entry was typed up and transferred with the Pastefire app.

Firmware updates and thoughts on paid Jailbreak apps

3.1.3 Firmware is latest in the game of tennis between Apple and Jailbreakers- but the losers in the game could be those of us who have paid for jailbreak apps that we’d lose forever if Apple succeeds in eliminating Jailbreaking.

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