iPhone Goodness

Some useful iPhone tidbits:

1. All of the below is contigent on jailbreaking. Really this is the only way I could ever justify buying an iPhone... Thanks a lot to the iphone-dev team. You guys rock.

2. If you want to develop an iPhone application, and don't want to pay apple, wait for their certificate, or go through their application review process then you should try: http://www.saurik.com/id/8 and Cydia for development, deployment, and distribution. In general everything by saurik is badass and worth reading.

3. If you want to be able run official applications in the back ground (for example listen to pandora while looking up something on maps) checkout "backgrounder" on cydia.

4. If you write your own app, and don't care about releasing it in the app store, you can run it in the background using:



@interface Thing : UIApplication {
}
@implementation Thing
- (void)applicationSuspend:(UIApplication *)application {
[super applicationSuspend: application];
}



Thanks AlJaMa in iphone-dev irc for that. (I haven't tried it yet)


5. If you want to be able to use Fring (or other wifi limited applications) over the cellular network, then there is a patch on cydia for that too: Voipover3g. You can apparently specify which applications to spoof wifi access for by editing /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/VoIPover3G.plist

The default config looks something like: "Filter = {Bundles = ("com.Fringland.Fring", "com.apple.AppStore", "com.audiofile.Interstate", "com.apple.MobileStore");};"


6. I haven't tried Erling's accelerometer hack on 2.x firmware yet, but hopefully it still works (allows you to adjust sample rate): http://blog.medallia.com/2007/08/iphone_accelerometer_source_co.html

UPDATE: It appears that there is a way to use the SDK to set the sample rate through UIAccelerometer.

7. http://www.cocoamachine.com/blog/ has also been a good resource. And of course there is always #iphone-dev on irc.osx86.hu

8. There are some headers missing from the official framework. You should be able to do a class dump:

class-dump -H /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator2.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/UIKit -o output-directory

The file it spits out is mach-o.

9. PDANet also from cydia, allows you to share the iphones 3g connection via wifi.

10. Netatalk appletalk / general storage.

11. DiskAid

Other: terminal, hp calc, stumbler plus, and on the app store Rooms (irc) and motionX dice.