Mar 31
JustinUncategorized
IM+ is probably the best instant messaging application for the iPhone. Sure, there are official AIM and Yahoo clients, but no client for Windows Live Messenger. Instead of bothering with a bunch of separate clients, why not use an all-in-one? As usual, I received a “free review copy,” but if that isn’t an option for you, it’s $9.99 in the App Store. Upon adding one or more accounts and signing in, you will be greeted with your contacts list. 
The IM+ Contact List Tapping the “i” icon to the right of any contact will provide you with details on the contact. 
A contact’s details, with the address removed for privacy reasons You can also opt into push notifications when a contact signs in. Unless you disable push notifications for the entire application, IM+ will send push notifications whenever you receive a new message from any contact, whether you have enabled push notifications upon their sign-in or not. This keeps you signed in even while the application is closed, and delivers messages, even while you’re doing something else. Tapping on the contact’s name will start a conversation. 
A conversation Conversations appear using a familiar chat bubble interface, somewhat similar to the iPhone’s Messages app. You can tap the caret-shaped icon to access options to invite contacts and send photos. 
The Status tab You can use the Status tab to switch between pre-defined statuses or create your own. The latest version of IM+ also finally supports multi-chat. 
A demonstration of IM+’s new multi-chat ability, showing a conversation with the fictional Miles Stone and a fake Steve Jobs While multi-chat is a step in the right direction, I’d still like to see proper Windows Live Groups support, although no other third-party client has it yet. Something I’d also like to see would be the ability to change your display name and picture from within IM+ as opposed to using a desktop client for these tasks. Overall score: 85/100
Mar 14
JustinUncategorized
Considering I didn’t want to bury one of these posts with the other, yet I wanted to post them at the same time, I decided to make them into one.
First off, I’m proud to release Justin Daigle (.com) v7. My blog is now using the Notepad theme by N.Design.
And to the right, you’ll find a link to the new public eyeOS install. If you want any applications added to it, contact me at admin [at] justindaigle [dot] com via WLM or e-mail.
I rather like this theme, and even people I figured would hate it only had positive things to say about it, so it’ll hopefully be here to stay for quite awhile. Still, to be perfectly honest, as my personal blog, the only opinion that really matters here is mine. 
Anyway, for now, the eyeOS install provides 10MB of storage. It’s not much, but the M1 server is used for quite a bit. Depending on demand, I’ll raise or lower it.
Now for the SoundHound review.
For those who don’t know, SoundHound is an iPhone app that “listens” using the iPhone’s microphone to any music in the area, then provides the name, album, artist, album artwork, lyrics, and other information on a song that is played, sung, or hummed, if it recognizes it. It’s $4.99 in the App Store, and while I have a “free review copy,” I’d imagine it’s well-worth the money if that’s not an option for you. 
The SoundHound main screen
SoundHound has various options, which can be configured in the iPhone’s Settings app. Listen on Start causes it to start listening instantly when you start it (obviously). I don’t really get the point of this option, as pressing the big button that says “What’s That Song?” isn’t really hard. The second (iPhone-only) option causes the iPhone to vibrate once it finishes detecting the song. I’m not entirely sure what the third option, “Use Bluetooth (Beta)” does. The Twitter and Facebook options provide integration with Twitter and (ugh) Facebook.
SoundHound’s preferences screen
Operation is easy. Just push the button that says “What’s That Song?” when you hear a song you want it to identify.
For the following examples, I will be playing music from my PC, in my room, at about the volume you’d expect to hear it in an average restaurant. I’ll have my iPhone 3GS about ten feet from my PC’s speakers. Even though it says to place your iPhone “as close to the sound source as possible,” in some places, that’s about 10-20 feet. Usually, when you need to identify a song, you can’t get right next to the source. Fortunately, it works quite well in my earlier example, a restaurant setting.
SoundHound correctly identifies Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”
It’s been able to identify almost every song I’ve thrown at it, even in noisier settings. It’s actually come in quite handy before, when I’ve heard songs before, and I’m lucky enough to hear them again some time later, whip out my iPhone, and use SoundHound to identify them. Now, let’s throw something a bit harder to identify at it, like the (as far as I know) unreleased Lady Gaga ft. Kalena – “Kaboom,” played at the exact same volume.
Strange…
To be fair, the copy of “Bad Romance” I played in the earlier example was at 320kbps, and “Kaboom” was at 256kbps. I’ll turn up the volume a bit…
Okay… I guess it’s just not in their database
Considering it’s “leaked” and “unreleased,” this doesn’t really surprise me. Still, I’d imagine enough people would have it to demand its entry into their database.
A feature I’d also like to see on their website would be a way to submit an MP3 to their database. I could find no such thing.
Let’s recap, shall we?
SoundHound is one of those apps I’ve long wished someone would make. Seems Melodis stepped up to the plate. It’s generally good at recognizing songs, even if they’re not all that loud, and there’s background noise, making it possible to use in practical situations. The only thing I could ask for is the ability for users to submit MP3′s to their database. I’d highly recommend SoundHound to anyone. Even if you already know every song out there, it’s still pretty fun to use when you’re bored at a place that happens to play music.
Overall score: 99/100
Mar 06
JustinUncategorized
No, I did not find the cell phone belonging to [insert name of random female celebrity here].
I DID manage to screw up my iPhone. AGAIN. For the second time this week.
This time, as opposed to by some random force (my final theory on last time is that Apple is disabling jailbroken phones somehow, considering I wasn’t the only person to report the same problem on the same day), this was caused by my own stupidity.
First, a bit of history for you. Back in 2006, before the iPhone was released, Apple had two teams working on the iPhone. One had the real hardware, running on a fake system software, and the other had the real software, running on fake hardware. This way, the whole thing couldn’t leak at once before it was announced. Only Steve Jobs and 8-10 other people had ever seen both at once. At some time last year, someone came across one of the hardware prototypes. Sporting an extremely ugly UI, it also had an app called SkankPhone.
For nostalgic value, I decided I was going to copy it from the leaked prototype firmware and attempt to run it on my 3GS, running 3.1.2. I copied in the app and frameworks as directed by a forum post, and surely enough the SkankPhone icon reared its ugly head on my SpringBoard.
Anyway, I tried running it. A screen came up for a split second showing the full version of the picture on the icon. Then it disappeared. Then, I tried possibly the worst idea imaginable. I went into Terminal and tried running the thing as root. What do I get for my troubles? A message simply stating “Killed.”
Later on, I reboot for something. It skips my passcode entirely and sends me to my SpringBoard, only none of my icons launch when tapped. I had to lock it and unlock it again, and then enter my passcode, to make them functional. Needless to say, this is a huge security flaw, so it’s restore time.
Fortunately, even though I feel really stupid now for screwing up my phone twice in a week, at least I have a backup from two days ago this time, as opposed to two months ago. I spend the next two hours getting everything back to normal. If you know me in real life, don’t get any ideas. My phone always requires its (very long, alphanumeric with special characters) passcode when it should once again.
Now for theories on what happened. To be fair, there were two other things I did that could’ve been the actual cause. For one thing, I copied in the frameworks supposedly necessary for SkankPhone.app to run. For another, I installed some extended preferences thing that’s enabled through WinterBoard, and then proceeded to modify it. I’m still suspecting the times I tried running SkankPhone.app though. I can’t remember all the details of what it does, but I believe it also functioned as a prototype SpringBoard of sorts, very well meaning it could’ve overwritten necessary settings files used by SpringBoard with prototype versions that don’t cooperate well with 3.1.2. Regardless of what caused it, I’ve learned something today [End South Park reference]. Copying in prototype apps and frameworks, and WinterBoard extensions that “extend” your preferences app, are all dangerous and stupid ideas.
Considering I have all my stuff exactly back to normal (getting it this way has become almost routine for me ), this incident won’t affect the review series I was planning on writing (the v7 release post will also include a review of one of my favorite apps).
Speaking of v7, sadly, some of my plans didn’t work out, but I will spill the beans on something. It does involve changes to my blog, and the result is stunning, to say the least. I have a fully-working copy of my blog in its v7 form, minus this post and the last one. 8 days and I won’t have to have a separate copy of my blog just for me to stare at all day.
Mar 03
JustinUncategorized
I’d hate to bury my last post already, but I’ve more or less decided what JDC v7′s going to be like, and I have every bit of it working already in some place or another.
I’m not giving out any details yet, but I can and will say that it has two major differences from the current (broken) v6, and one minor fix to something that’s been bothering people for quite awhile now. 
Oh, and another cryptic hint at what it’ll be like, to add to the mix. I had to make sure I was posting this in the right place. 
In case you didn’t read the title/don’t know when Pi Day is, I’ll say it again. Justin Daigle (.com) v7 will be released on Pi Day 2010 (March 14).
No, Pi Day isn’t at all relevant to v7, I just traditionally do major changes to my site on holidays.
I’m not entirely sure I’m done throwing v7 together yet, so it may be an even bigger change than it is now.
Then again, I suppose it’s a fairly safe bet that most of the changes will be adding stuff, since my site is no longer the scattered mess it used to be. It’s basically my personal blog and file storage.
Mar 03
JustinUncategorized
For those who keep up with me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/jrdaigle1000), you would know that last night around 9PM, my iPhone just randomly quit working. I attempted rebooting it several times, but accomplished nothing. I finally had to restore, and apply a backup from about a month and a half ago. It took me about three hours total to restore, apply the backup, sync all my stuff, jailbreak, and apply all my customizations. Strangely enough, some of my cracked apps actually remembered all their settings, making it somewhat less painful.
Am I writing this to discourage people from jailbreaking?
Absolutely not.
If you read the rest of the post, you’d notice that I said that I jailbroke almost instantly after restoring (also, thanks to Link Tamake for warning me not to use the 3.1.3 update). The customization/system tools/cracked apps/tethering makes it 100% worthwhile. I still find it strange that this happened to me only hours after someone else reported the exact same problem though. A new virus? Some people say no, but I still find it quite suspicious.
If anything, besides the loss of three hours, I benefited from this. I was originally on 3.1, but I took advantage of this to restore to 3.1.2, which fixes the annoying bug that disrupts service, requiring a reboot to fix (For the record, this bug plagued me quite a bit). Also, for some odd reason, redsn0w didn’t like my 3.1 IPSW, making me unable to enable verbose boot. It recognized my 3.1.2 IPSW, however, so I now have a nice, shiny verbose boot going. This is probably the geekiest thing ever said, but there is something truly magical about that text informing you of how the boot process is going flying across the screen.
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