TQs' Theory of iVolution

Welcome to the weekly(ish)iPhone blog/update. Some regular readers will not be too surprised to see that I have now become obsessed with the iPhone. Not that I'm an addictive personality type in any way (fags, booze) but this whole iPhone thing has me hooked. I thought I loved my HTC but it wasn't true love. The problem with the HTC (mine is a Touch Diamond with windows mobile version 6)is that it's windows based so works intuitively, syncs with my PC and basically does what I want to do when I want to do it. What fun is that?

Apple have created a phone that is entirely designed around controlling what you can do and when. Not only controlling you but even controlling the developers. That's where the fun starts. Someone bought one of these iPhones but didn't like being stuck with a single network provider. Realising that the phone was just a small PC they found a way to view the file structure of the phone and remove the network provider restriction. Opening the file structure became known as jail breaking, whilst altering the default provider is known as unlocking.

Once you can see the file structure (jail breaking) it's a relatively simple matter to start changing things and adding things. It's no more or less complicated than changing the wall paper on your PC. What's more if you get stuck there are a million forums that will help. (remind me to get back to that) If you get really stuck you can just restore your phone to its un-jail broken state and start again.

The changes that you make to a jail broken phone will be completely lost whenever iPhone upgrade the software which, in my experience, is about every six - eight weeks for minor tweaks and every six months for major operating system type overhauls. The tweaks aren't that big a problem as they are mostly attempts to fix or speed up a process and the Dev-Team as the jail breakers call themselves tend to be ahead of apple on this constantly. The result, a jail broken phone on OS4 is just as, if not more, up to date as an non jail broken phone using OS 4.02 so there is no real need to upgrade. Jail breakers however can't take advantage of an update until the Dev-Team have checked it out and worked out how to obtain the file structure again. For owners of the new iPhone four this is developing into quite an issue. For owners of older cheaper phones like my iPhone 3g with 8gb memory this is no problem at all and an up to date break is usually available within the first 24 hours of an update.

When you upgrade you have to redo the jail break. That involves several things. You need to run software to jailbreak. You need to install software providers known as 'repos' (I need three of these) and then you need re-install the apps that those programs provide. I use Appulous which allows you to install apps without using iTunes (perhaps apps that cost money that you might like to try before purchasing), my3g which makes my phone treat 3g reception as wifi so that I can watch TV on my phone even without wifi, iAddkiller which beats off pop up advertising that you should be forced to suffer according to apple, Finally you need Appsync. What Appsync does is allows you to view your iPhones file structure in the same way that you would view the C drive on your PC with folders, subfolders and files. After this is done you can also re-install your, perhaps, unpaid for apps which will still show against your phone but wont work until the jailbreak process is complete.

The final app I install after a jailbreak is known as winterboard. It's basically a skinning or theme app. Google it and you'll quickly discover that you don't need to be some sort of iClone. You can pretty much change the appearance of everything to suit yourself. There are off the shelf packages that will make loads of changes for you or, once you figure out how it's done, you can make changes yourself. The pic on the right in the ivolution image above is my phone as it presently looks. I downloaded a theme known as iElegance which gave me the background and changed some of my icons to the new look that you see. This theme had a clock and date function that I didn't like it so downloaded another theme called HTC springboard. I copied the files from the second theme and pasted them over the clock files from the first. I then searched google for iElegance type icons. There were loads of them and someone had even made a down loadable zip file so I downloaded this and set about altering my remaining icons. I removed the new folder icons by changing their file extensions and replaced them with new ones that matched my theme. Learning and doing took about three days.

The result shown above is exactly what I wanted. To be clear. If you had just wanted to transform your iPhone to look like an HTC there's a winterboard theme that will do that with weather and calender etc. What I wanted was the appearance of an HTC with the functionality of an iPhone. Thanks to jail breaking, Winterboard, theme developers and the dev-team that's exactly what I've got. If Apple allowed HTC to create an OS for their phone I doubt that it would look to much different. I prefer apples Icons and folders to HTCs menu bars but I prefer the HTC look. I've got it and it works.

In around two weeks there will be another apple update rumoured to be called 4.1. The upgrade will fix an issue with 3g reception. Will I upgrade? Yep. What I have done differently this time is that I have copied folders such as themes and jailbreak apps directly to my computer. My hope is that I can restore my jailbreak fully within 3 hours of an upgrade. If I can then it will be worth it.

Finally, for the most part the jailbreak community are pretty helpful. Loads of how to guides, loads of sites to help you keep up to date. I was surprised therefor with Modmyi.com. I posted three posts there as a newbie and did not get a single response. There was lots of help on the site but I think us newbies with our specific questions may be a bit simpleton for them.

Normal blog to follow and more of the 'iTry' next week.

Cheers
T