Tag Archives: hack

iOS 5.0.1 / Learning My Lesson

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iOS 5.0.1 – Learning My Lesson

I was on the edge of my seat along with everyone else, there was word that Apple was going to push iOS 5.0.1 OTA to all the upgraded devices. Then TUAW made the announcement on Twitter that the upgrade was live and ready to go. I opened up my iPhone and there it was. 56MB upgrade waiting for me. I tapped the Upgrade button and off it went.

I was filled with fear when it came to my iPad First Generation device. Right after iOS 5.0 was released for my iPad and after I upgraded that device to iOS 5.0 I noticed that my iPad lacked the advertised multitasking gestures. I felt dejected so I moved along without. Shortly after that I noticed on the LifeHacker blog an article that would guide me through using the RedSn0w jailbreak tool to hack-in the multitasking gestures on my iPad. I moved ahead and applied the patch and watched with horror as my iOS device went through various cycles of rebooting and loading and one really upsetting sequence when it was just text, like it was the Linux kernel starting up. One of the reasons why I really love Apple is the insulation away from the expectant horrors of text startups. Never knowing if you are going to read “FAILURE” or “Kernel Panic” or something messy. I’d prefer to hide all of that behind helpful routines in a classical dialog box once the OS comes up and deal with it then. But I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them my iPad was waiting for me with the multitasking gestures enabled. I enjoyed my iPad and for a time everything was going wonderfully. Then Apple announced iOS 5.0.1.

I tried three times to upgrade my iPad, and each time there was an unknown upgrade error. I knew full well what the problem was. The hack was in the way. Apple was running a checksum on the kernel on my iPad and it was failing that check, so no upgrade for me! So I tried in vain to see if there was a way to back the hack out of my iPad and it turns out, there wasn’t one. So I meekly trudged forward, hat in my hands, head bowed and restored my iPad back to factory specifications. It erased everything off my device. Really that was okay, since the last time I did this upgrade to iOS 5 it was a loss-tastic failboat to hell. I’ve been keeping everything on my Dropbox, so losing the files on my iPad really wasn’t a risk for me anymore. When I woke my iPad up, it was as if it was fresh from the factory all over again, but this time with the self-starting parts of iOS 5 doing the lead-in with me. I set it up, and when I came across the backup/restore options I elected to restore my data from iCloud, and I had a valid backup from 8:30am this morning, so that worked well. Then it looked just like I had to start from scratch all over again for about 30 seconds and right after that iCloud came crashing down into my device – all my apps are now busy loading from iCloud. We’ll see how that turns out, but one this is for certain, I’m done with these jailbreak/hack tools. I lost an entire afternoon to the silly botch that was that hack and I can’t afford to lose time like this in the future.

At least I was able to claw victory from the gaping maw of defeat, that I am thankful for. There was a way to go back and I wasn’t trapped with a half-life-half-stuck device. I’m not going to do that ever again! Yikes! 🙂

The difference between iPods and iPhones

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Now that I have my new iPhone, I’m thrilled to have it and using it is wonderful. While I’ve been working with it I’ve run into a strange oddity and a workaround for it. The oddity came when I tried to create my own iPhone-compatible ringtones. The creation of iPhone custom ringtones are in themselves needlessly fussy procedure. First you find the music you want, trim it to 40 seconds, then convert it to AAC format. Then you tear it out of iTunes, change the extension from m4a to m4r and then insert that back into the device for assignment.

What gets me about the ringtone creation is how involved and outrageously fussy it is. It wasn’t meant to be this way, the design clearly points to strict control. When Apple makes something easy, it’s ridiculously easy. This is something different. This is capitalism. Apple went a long way to make this obfuscation stick and the proof is in the obnoxious lengths that you have to go through if you don’t want to buy a ringtone from the iTunes store.

I ran into another issue with my new iPhone. I plugged it into my MacBook and tried to add the newly manufactured ringtone to the device. Then I discovered a rather new and odd limitation. An iPhone apparently fixates on the iTunes library that it first sees, it is with this library that you can turn on “Manage Manually” mode with an iPhone. Any other library locks the phone out but offers you the option of continuing by wiping your device and re-fixating on a new iTunes library. I quickly came up with a great way to beat Apple at this oddity, I created a new iTunes library from scratch (just the directory structure and some key files) and placed it on my Dropbox. Then using the option-key goaded iTunes to start from a different library, pointed it to my Dropbox-iTunes folder and now I have a work-on-any-machine-Manual-Manage iTunes skeleton that allows me to insert homemade ringtones into my new iPhone.

What a long way around for something that should be simple. Apple, if you are listening, the solution is only lengthy and annoying. It’s been paved by your own software and the only piece missing is either a USB memory stick or Dropbox. How easy would it have been to design this with the same vigor that you designed everything else? Eventually your customers find ways around this sort of thing, doesn’t that inevitability mean it’s not worth pursuing in the first place?

Humph.