February 25, 2008

Fixing Installer.app on iPod Touch 1.1.3

Christian Decker wrote this late at night:
I just got my iPod Touch (or as some call it iTouch) back from my friend who was so nice and put the 1.1.3 Firmware on it, which I really like. What I didn’t like was that the installer no longer works or at least it only works sporadically. This seems to be a problem with some scripting bindings missing in the installer and therefore returning the infamous “Error in Script command 1: InstallApp” Message. It took me quite some time to find a fix for this and it’s working again so I decided to share it with all the people who ran into the same issues:
  1. Install BossTool to free up space. Just tell it to move the Fonts and Ringtones and you shoudl have enough free space for a lot more applications.
  2. Reinstall Installer.app. As I said the Installer.app is somehow corrupted while jailbreaking and needs to be re-installed:
  3. Open Installer.app
  4. Go to Uninstall
  5. Select Installer.app
  6. Choose Reinstall in the upper right corner
  7. Exit the Installer.app by pressing Home
  • Restart the iTouch or go back to Installer.app and kill it by holding the Home button until the Springboard comes back.
  • That’s it :D
    • After starting the Installer.app again you should be able to install all the applications that gave errors previously like MobileScrobbler, Funambol, iShare, …

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    January 15, 2008

    Google for iPhone gets a make over

    Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
    When checking Google for iPhone earlier today and, surprise, it was heavily improved. The new Gmail interface is incredibly intuitive to use and just feels right. The only thing that isn’t perfect is the way you access tags and folders through the “menu”-button on the top which is a bit couterintuitive, the rest is just fine.
    Another major improvement is that now you can bookmark the tab you are in, so now we jump right into gmail or the reader application, bypassing the search screen which is pretty useless for iPhones anyway because they have a search bar next to the address field.
    The reader hasn’t changed too much and my wish hasn’t been granted: images still aren’t resized to fit the screen size so big images still break the layout.
    The calendar now is nice too. The day and month view are perfect to get a quick overview of tasks and appointments, but why oh why can’t I add or edit entries? It wouldnt have been that hard to add that feature, would it?

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    September 11, 2007

    Hacking iUI

    Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:
    Joe Hewitt’s iUI is just great. As long as you do standard stuff…

    I’ve been working on a small application based on the iUI Framework for some time now, and I hope to release it soon. So far iUI was working fine for me and I managed to squeeze everything into the limited functionality it provided me. But now, just like the iUI Author, I’m getting a bit bored by the “standard iPhone look” so I’m trying to find new, innovative, ways of adding functionality. Sliding from left to right and from right to left is cool, as long as you don’t have to see it over and over again, it’s time for some cool new stuff, that might not already exist in iPhone-land. I’m currently experimenting with scriptaculous to add some effects and I’m also trying to get some inplace editing to run smoothly.

    Callbacks from iUI
    iUI dictates some default behaviour when clicking on something, be it a link or a form button, even adding additional callbacks won’t prevent iUI from reacting. Wouldn’t it be nice to add callbacks directly into iUI, in a declarative way, so we don’t have to hack around too much?

    Edit in place
    Many have already forgotten about this nice thing: you have something displayed somewhere, you click on it, and can edit it, without having to load an extra page, maybe loosing the context. With the above mentioned callbacks this shouldn’t be too hard to realize.

    iUI for everybody
    Maybe it’s just me but limiting my application to the iPhone is a bit… restrictive, isn’t it? I noticed that iUI applications actually are great for start pages, such as iGoogle, Netvibes and similar. By making a Netvibes module you even allow users to add it to the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Vista Widget engine. So making iUI compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox would be a source for new users (well ok Firefox already works with some minor bugs, not much to do here…)

    Well these are just a few ideas I had while developing with iUI, what about you?

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    August 27, 2007

    Interesting stuff around the Web

    Christian Decker wrote this in the late afternoon:
    This section includes some of the most interesting articles I read in the last few days. They are not focused on any topic, but I’d like to share them with you as they are insightful and helpful.

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    July 11, 2007

    What the iPhone means to WebDev

    Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:

    iPhone
    Now that the hype around the iPhone starts to subside, the real value is starting to shine through. For the development of web applications it means that a whole new breed of applications now have a market (think of widget that act as a fully fledged application). More and more web applications start to surface that are specifically tailored to portable devices (with small screens). So what I think the iPhone started (and other phones such as OpenMoko will continue) is the era of small, really specialised, applications, pushing Ajax with it.

    The other great thing is that OpenID (my other favorite topic :D) will also start being used more extensivel, because we all know that writing on small devices is a real pain. There’s a great post over at FactorCity on OpenID & iPhone, which I think says it all.

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