Macgasm

Long after Apple launched MobileMe, they are starting to roll out a few new features that people have been longing for. If you’re already a user of the service, you can login to me.com/mail today, and you’ll be greeted by a small note at the bottom left of the screen asking you to “Request an invitation” if you’d like to participate in the beta. At some point soon, you’ll receive an email if you’re one of the chosen people.

One of the main features I’m most happy about them adding to the mix is Mail Rules. I’m a big user of rules in Mail.app on my main Mac, and it bugs the hell out of me that if I go out, then any email I get while I’m out is getting filtered as it should back home. This causes me to get no notification of the emails on the iPhone as they sit in a folder; it only seems to tell me of new mail which goes directly to the inbox. The only way I can find them is by browsing through my huge list of folders to see if any are marked. Is this just me, or a common problem everybody has with it? Because I’d like to know if I’ve missed part of the game somewhere…

So, I’ll be glad when this comes along, as long as I can sync all the rules I already have up to me.com, but from what their notes say, I don’t know if this will actually be possible. “Set them up at me.com, and your rules organize your incoming email on the web and everywhere else — on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC.”. Will have to wait and see, as I don’t fancy having to set them all up again online when they already exist.

Anyway, here’s a list showing some of the new features you can expect to see in the beta, and if you don’t get in then you’ll hopefully see them when they roll it out live to everyone.

Widescreen and compact views. When reading your mail at me.com, the new widescreen view lets you see more of each message with less scrolling. Choose compact view to hide your folders or classic view to see more of your message list.

Rules to keep your email organized everywhere. Mail rules help you reduce inbox clutter by automatically filing messages into folders you select ahead of time. Set them up at me.com, and your rules organize your incoming email on the web and everywhere else — on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC.

Single-click archiving. Click the Archive button and the selected message is quickly filed into the Archive folder where it’s always available for future reference.

Formatting toolbar. You can create great-looking email messages using formatting buttons to bold or italicize text, change font color, insert images, and more. You can even create formatted web links to hide long URLs.

Improved performance. Mail at me.com loads your inbox and messages faster. And with interface refinements such as the ability to scroll through your entire inbox without having to manually click to load the next set of messages, you’ll be able to work more efficiently.

Increased security with SSL. With the MobileMe Mail beta, accessing your email on the web is more secure than ever. Your inbox is protected to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on your webmail. As always, you receive SSL protection when you use your MobileMe Mail account on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC.

The beta is best viewed with Firefox 3.6, and Internet Explorer 8, and a load of other questions and answers you may have can be found here

And here we have it, available for all to go and test out now is the new Spirit Jailbreak from comex of the iPhone Dev Team.
Spirit will jailbreak all the latest iDevice firmwares, but comes with a few words of warnings for those that may be a little too hasty in their clickings.

1. Spirit is not a carrier unlock.
2. If you currently are using a tethered jailbreak, you have to restore to use Spirit.
3. Do not upgrade if you use an unlock on an iPhone 3G or 3GS. (You can, however, restore to 3.1.2 if you have SHSH blobs for that version.)

The Jailbreak is available for Windows and Mac OS X, and will work on any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2.

Notes on the site warn that the iPad jailbreak is still a very beta version, so do it at your own risk and make sure you back everything up to iTunes before hand just incase it messes up.

Cydia’s still not got a “final look” for the iPad, and I doubt at the moment there will be many things availble for iPad users on it. There will probably be an iPad section listing all the available packages (if there isn’t one already. I don’t have an iPad to check).

If you’re feeling confident, head over to http://spiritjb.com/, read everything, and read everything again, then give it a go.

Let us know how it goes if you try it out on any of the devices in the comments.

We’re interested in what Cydia looks like for the iPad so if you can share some screenshots we’ll include them in the post with props!

Musclenerd from the iPhone Dev Team is back again today with more teasers for iPad users. This time posting some iPad information on his Twitter page. He links to a video showing the iPad sending SMS messages to an iPhone. There is no app for this at the moment, as the iPhones SMS app does’t run natively on the iPad, so it’s all done through code. Also as the AT&T sims bundled with the iPads dont support SMS, he’s using a hacked up T-Mobile sim so it fits in the Micro Sim size slot the iPad uses.

It’s a sign of things to come though, even if you do have to use another sim card just to do it.
Would you be willing to (literally) chop, and change sim cards around just to send sms messages to people?

In case you had any doubt that the brand new 3G iPad that you received today would be un-jailbreakable, the Dev Team has posted a teaser video for you to drool over. The video clearly illustrates an iPad running Cydia.

As you can tell from the video that the DevTeam released a couple weeks back, the firmware is the same, so there’s no surprise the jailbreak works for the 3G iPad. There’s no release date posted for when they’re going to make a jailbreak available, but when they do, it wont just be good for the iPads of the  world, because it’ll work on your iPhones and iPod’s as well.

The DevTeam is planning one tool for all of Apple’s devices — making it much easier for consumers to manage their jailbreaks.

The news from yesterday comes with a typical Dev Team warning stating “Backup your SHSH blobs.” While you dont need to do this to jailbreak, it’ll help if you have them readily available if anything should go wrong, and you have to downgrade at somepoint.

Head over to the post by the Dev Team from yesterday for more info and links on how to do this.

It’s only been out for around 24 hours, and the Dev Team have already cracked it, that’s right, the iPad has been jailbroken. What else would I be talking about?

MuscleNerd from the Dev Team posted a picture, and also the following YouTube video on his twitter account showing how they’ve already got root acess into the device using a version of the Spirit jailbreak by fellow hacker Comex. This hack targets a bug in mobile Safari on firmware 3.1.3 on the iPhone, and 3.2 on the iPad which clearly doesn’t escape the same flaw.

There’s still a lot of work to do before it’s available for public consumption, but that’s all the proof we need for now. For those of you lucky enough to have your hands on one of the 700.000 iPad’s sold on launch day, it wont be long before you can start applying your own themes, sounds, and a whole host of other things I’m sure will become availble soon after it’s out there for the masses.

Sometime last year, while downloading a file on the Mac that I used as a backup and to do all my dirty work, it just froze. There was no Kernel Panic — nothing. It just stopped dead in its tracks, and a few minutes later the hard drive started clunking. ‘Oh. I guess it’s dead then’ I thought. My iBook G4, after 4 years of service to me had decided to kick the bucket Not bad going, I guess. I expected it to live a lot longer than that really, but I was certainly putting it through it paces every single day, and the little old 60GB HDD just couldn’t keep up with the pace. I looked into getting the drive replaced by going along to the store on London’s Regents Street, but the genius didn’t really have any ideas about prices, nor seemed particularly bothered about trying to find out for me unless I took it in. Seems a bit stupid. It needs a new hard drive. What would you charge to do it?Not going to make any difference if you see the machine or not right?

A few months went past and it sat on it’s stand collecting dust, and then I moved my XBox onto the desk in it’s place, and I figured I really should do something about it, my poor Macbook it taking a beating with everything i’m trying to make it do.

I decided to brave the water that I’d never tested before, and take the task of rising the machine from the ashes myself. I headed over to ifixit.com. Using their guide, I managed to figure out which machine it was I had, without even having to boot it up, good job they told me I could do that, because I had no idea.

I did some online shopping for a new 2.5″ HDD to put in, and I went for a 160GB after quite a bit of shopping around. These smaller drives are quite a bit more expensive for massive sizes, and as much as I wanted to cram a 360GB in it, I talked myself down to a more reasonably priced drive instead. Stuff goes on and comes off it again with a pretty quick turnaround anyway, so it’s plenty. I just like massive hard drives.

A spudger, a set of torx screwdriver and size 00 philips screwdriver later, and I just had to await the postman to bring me it all.

Last week, it all arrived, and I set aside a Saturday evening to get to grips with it, man up, and do some DIY on the poor thing. With my printed guide from iFixit, the living room table cleared and surrounded by tools, I set up my Xbox webcam (gotta own something Microsoft, right?) on the Macmini to capture a picture every 5 seconds using Gawker, and my Macbook in front of me livestreaming the fix for anyone bored enough to watch using UStream (ended up being two of my friends), and for a possible Google search if I ran in to any problems.

I was expecting the fix to take around 3 hours, after reading reports of it taking some people that long, but the actual drive replacement seemed to only take me around an hour and a half from first screw out, to last screw in.

The guides from Ifixit are a godsend, everything was simply explained and not to much info in each step, and the screw guide’s they have included in the PDF versions help you keep each steps screws separated so you can work through backwards and know where each screw goes. Of course, even with such a simple guide I still ran into a couple of problems, like forgetting to re attach the keyboards ribbon cable before screwing the ram cover on and re-installing the airport card. Luckily, that was only 4 or screws, though. No biggie, and I’m allowed one slip up. Right?

Fingers crossed, I booted it up and almost cried and the beloved machine chimed at me letting me know it was once again healthy.

I inserted a copy of OS X 10.5, expecting to just be able to install that, but it turned out those disc’s were the disc’s we were sent by Apple after my dad bought a new Macbook Pro with 10.4 on it only for a week later 10.5 to come out. So they were only upgrade disc’s, no good for a brand new install.

OK, I’ll try the 10.4 disc we have, again, but I just kept getting Kernel Panics. I was almost having a Kernel Panic myself at this point. Three hours into my fix, and I was stumped. Why the hell is it doing this? I’ve replaced the drive, and everything else is fine. Why are you doing this to me? I came to the conclusion the discs were for a Intel based Mac, and most probably tied to my MacBook somehow, so would be no good for me to use on the PPC iBook.

I went back to 10.5, as at least this one let me into disc utility. I partitioned the new drive, and gave it a name. Then, I had to search around in the loft of the house for the original discs that shipped with the iBook. Luckily, they were in view right as I went up there. Phew.

Dusting off the envelope which held all the original info that came with the machine, it was great to see how much Apple’s packaging has changed in just a few years. A huge Panther user guide, nicely designed iLife disc’s and some of the big Apple stickers you used to get. They seem to have shrunk them over the recent years, apparently. That is, if they’re even still bundled with things.

I insert them, and we have life! No more Kernel Panic on loading up the disc. No more “You cant use this disc as it’s an upgrade.” Just the sweet look of 10.3 loading onto the iBook. I gave a small cheer and a huge smile and sigh of relief. Once it was all installed, looking at the old OS was just like looking at the user guide. Oh, how they have changed. Not massive changes; just small UI changes.

What seemed like 50 system updates and countless restarts later it was back, my iBook was smiling at me once again and was begging to be used.

But it has to wait. I have a pesky ‘can’t mount’ error come up now when I try to mount anything. I’m now waiting for my dad to bring round the original 10.4 discs so that I can upgrade to that. Then I’ll upgrade to 10.5, and hope all the bugs are ironed out.

Phew, long post! A few quick notes, though:

To anyone with a broken Mac, iPhone, or iPod, do check out ifixit.com. They have guides for everything. I’ve used them before to fix a 2nd Gen iPod as well. The guides are amazingly easy to follow, and they have good forums and help sections if you run into any problems. You can also help them out a little by buying the tools and parts directly through them.

This fix was rated difficult on the site, so read through the guides, and if you don’t feel comfortable and don’t think you could do some steps, then it’s best to get help or pay for someone to do it for you. Nothing worse than jolting and scrapping your screwdriver along the motherboard, eh? :)

Here’s the time lapse I captured. You can’t always see what I’m doing as I needed light for some parts so had to face it the other way. I also needed to eat, so you see me get up and go off to cook some diner with my girlfriend. But, I’m no editor so it’s all in there with no music. Only a couple of minutes though, so no big deal.

This could be a clever aim at a viral advert for UK iPhone carrier Orange as it’s the only video on the YouTube page, but the phone in the video is actually on O2, so it’s not. But it’s a great use of science, and a well put together little video that’s going to show that you can power more than just little clocks using fruit like oranges.

Via Geeky Gadgets

Tubbypaws is back with more papercraft, and this time it’s Apple related.
So, if you have the patience and the need/want to recreate your own Steve Note on your desk, you can download this handy template, get your favourite scissors and glue out, and get cutting and sticking.

This isn’t the first ‘create your own’ iPad which we’ve seen, the other day macrumors posted about a full sized one that Jess Silverstone, the lead artist for Revolutionary Concepts had put together for her team, and they are now coming in useful they say ‘btw we now have six ipaperpads and they are actually helping us with the scale of graphics and UI placement for our upcoming iPad apps’.

So, you can make that one too if you like.

Scared of glue? Love Legos? How about you make one out of Legos instead then like jmenomeno on Flickr.
There are probably a whole host more papercraft and other iPad mockups out there, I saw one made of foam the other day, and they were up for sale on eBay, but I can’t find that one to link to anymore, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Let us know in the comments if you have any sucess making this. I tried my hand at making the Portal one a few years ago, needed thicker card, but it turned out all right.
Good luck!