zerolight

I discovered Customize2 the other day and have been messing with it. It lets you build more complex themes than merely using SummerBoard alone, though it does interact with SummerBoard. SSH and DropCopy are your friends for this sort of stuff.

I’ve spent a lot time tweaking a theme of my own. It’s called zerotheme. I did it all on the iTouch itself via a terminal app I’ve installed. I’ve tried using the Customize Web App to build and share it, but after 4 failed attempts (zerolight – zerolightV4) it’s clear that the web-app is currently horribly broken. Any new theme you create ends up as empty folders when shared and downloaded by others – as 28 people told me! Still it works perfectly when built on my iTouch.

It’s got a variation of the dock I use on my iMac, the one I replaced the ugly Leopard one with. It’s got a bunch of icons from David Lanham and Louie Mantia, some nice wallpaper, and a few nice icons I made myself. I also replaced the WiFi indicator with a 5 bar indicator which gives a more accurate indication of the signal strength, and there’s nifty little a blue battery indicator too on the status bar. I made a tweak to the badge, and updated the battery charging screen, then gave it a Stüssy based lock screen… you know I love Stüssy.

edit: If you want it, and since the Customize Web App is f*cked, you can download it for a manual install here.

edit: I’ve migrated it to firmware 2.0 and submitted it to a Cydia repository. In the space of a few hours it’s been downloaded over 1100 times. EEK.

I’ve avoided this little gem of an app for ages. It’s available to jailbroken iPod Touches and iPhones. I never got the pun until recently – Apple call their launcher SpringBoard, SummerBoard enhances it. Doh. Most of the themes I’d seen were pretty poor, with garish backgrounds and ugly icons. However there’s a few good ones, mostly by Louie Mantia often based on icons by David Lanham.

I decided to give it a go yesterday, and whilst I was at it, I mildly tweaked the two themes I liked best Agua (by David Lanham and Louie Mantia) and Buuf2 (by Louie Mantia). The results are below, alongside the original Apple SpringBoard theme. I kinda like it for now. Click the images to enlarge. Photoset here.

I’ve made a few minor updates to my site, Apple-ifying it somewhat with the addition of iPod Touch / iPhone style calendar icons dating each post. I also wrote a new Joomla module, an icon based menu, which I’ve also Apple-ified. And finally, there’s some minor tweaking to the look of the modules on the right. All very minor stuff, but it was fun.

Having already Jailbroken my iPodTouch I decided to actually research the jailbreaking of an iPodTouch/iPhone. I did this, in a rather backwards sort of way, because having used the ziphone method I had found my iPod wasn’t behaving entirely as expected – there were permission problems on certain folders, and despite ssh’ing into the iPod as root, I was unable to correct them.

My research suggested that whilst ziphone does exactly what it says on the tin, and works well, it’s been cobbled together from a number of sources, perhaps not always correctly. If you plan to tinker, or do anything more advanced with the iPod, you may run into problems with the ziphone solution. Certainly, you need a patch to even be able to connect to the iPod with iBricker or iPhoneBrowser.

iLiberty+ is currently garnering a lot of praise, and has been developed by some respected coders. One of the niggles iPhone users have with ziphone is that it permanently downgrades your bootloader which can have warranty implications, whereas iLiberty apparently does not. Of course this is not a worry for iPod users like myself.

iLiberty+ comes in two flavours, Mac and Windows, with the Windows version seemingly futher down the development ladder (I was able to download payloads for the windows version rather than the Mac version, disappointingly). edit: looks like the Mac version has been updated. As such, I opted for the Windows install, along with Cydia, and Installer for the iPod. Cydia is a better Unix based subsystem than the more commonly used BSD Subsystem found in ziphone, particularly as it comes with it’s own package installer which may eventually replace Nullrivers Installer 3. More importantly, Cydia shuffles the iPod’s OS files around a little bit, freeing up, by my calculations, about 60mb of OS partition space. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s provided me with something like 300% extra space for 3rd party apps.

As it happens, despite some internet rumblings about iLiberty being more complex than ziphone, the process is quick, and painless. I spent about 45 mins trying to see if I could get payloads (extra packages like Cydia and Installer) to work on the Mac before giving up and spending 10 mins doing it on the PC. You simply tick the payloads required, then click a button and sit back and wait. It took 10 minutes only because my laptop is old skool USB 1.0, hence my original desire to do it on the Mac. Since jailbreaking my iPod I notice that the developers have released a new Mac version with features on a par with the PC version.

The upgrade was flawless, permissions are correct – I can even use DropCopy to auto-install apps that I can’t find on a repo – like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. I’ve installed around 12 third party apps, and have around 77mb of free OS space. I was even able to run iLiberty a second time on my now jailbroken iPod to add Installer, as I’d initially gone with just Cydia – to my surprise it kept Cydia and my already installed apps, whilst adding Installer. The permissions issue, the extra space, and the fact that iLiberty just seems to get everything right, means that my vote goes to iLiberty over ziphone.

I’ve had my iPod Touch for a couple of weeks now. I’d decided when I got it that I was not going to jailbreak it. I mean, why bother? The 32GB model already comes with the iPhone apps – mail, calendar, safari, etc. Jailbreaking it provides you with what? MobileScrobbler, a dictionary, solitaire, a wallpaper app, Finder (to find what?), and a means of taking screenshots, to name just a few of the exciting options available to you. Is there really any point, especially with Apple bringing 3rd party apps to you via iTunes in a few months? No, is the simple answer, there is no point. Naturally, yesterday, I jailbroke my iPod. It didn’t go well, but as the following picture testifies, I got there in the end. Read more…

All went well initially. I installed the aforementioned applications. Then I had a tinker, and changed my ssh password using the passwd command. Some geek recommended that. Bad idea. The only way someone could get onto your iPod via the default password is if you leave SSH switched on (battery drain) and then connect your iPod to an insecure wifi network. If you are that stupid, then yay for you. It turns out that if you change the password via the passwd command, then it turns your iPod/iPhone into a paperweight with flashing icons, post reboot. Great stuff. And cheers Mr Geekboy. So I had to restore it back to factory default, re-jailbreak it, re-install same pointless apps, re-sync my iTunes and iPhoto libraries, oh, and then fix my mail app as that was suddenly broken. Groan.

All this effort was worthwhile for one single app. MobileScrobbler. It’s great. If only because I don’t have to use any silly workarounds when I come home after listening to the iPod in the car. I just walk into the house, turn the iPod on, it connects to the net via wifi and scrobbles my played tracks. It also runs whilst the iPod is connected to the car kit (the iPod Music Player doesn’t) so you can crash you car looking at album art rather than the road. Worryingly, since the official iTunes apps can’t run in the background, the chances are, MobileScrobbler will be impossible going down the official route. Boo.

On a more positive note, the actual jailbreaking of the iPod is a piece of cake using ziphone 3.0. Download it, double click it, wait a minute or two whilst the iPod reboots, and disco… it’s done, complete with the Nullriver Installer app. Whack on BossPrefs (to disable SSH amongst other things) and you’re ready to go.