Verizon iPhone 4 users can now untether their iOS 4.2.7 jailbreak thanks to a new Verizon Untether tool available on Cydia. All you need to do is install the package from Cydia on a currently tethered phone and it will become untethered, it’s very easy:

• Launch Cydia and add the following rep: http://cydia.pushfix.info
• Search for “Verizon Untether 4.2.7” and install the package
• Reboot your iPhone

Jailbreaking the Verizon iPhone on iOS 4.2.7 is the same as jailbreaking 4.3.2 using redsn0w, just remember to download the iOS 4.2.7 IPSW for the CDMA iPhone 4 instead of iOS 4.3.2.

If you’ve stayed on the sidelines but you’re curious about all of this, check out some reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone straight from the creator of Cydia himself.

Dying to let Apple know how you feel about the iPhone? Do you have a great idea on how to make the MacBook Pro even better? Do you know of a way to improve the efficiency of a product? Stop keeping this stuff to yourself, you can give Apple feedback directly about products, and they actually encourage it!

Head on over to Apple.com Product Feedback and select the product you want to chime in on. Whether or not they’ll listen to your feature request or rant remains to be seen, but at least you got it off your chest.

Here’s me requesting the next generation MacBook Air gets a glowing keyboard and how I want a pony for Christmas:
Read more »

If you dream of Mac laptops you’ll like this one. From the looks of things, there’s a MacBook Pro 15″, MacBook Air 13″, MacBook Pro 13″, MacBook Air 11″, and a mystery Mac behind the the top two (maybe another MacBook Air 13?). All these Macs belong to Garrett Murray of ManiacalRage. If you’re wondering why there are so many Macs in the picture, it’s because he’s transitioning his household from the heavier MacBook Pro’s to ultraportable MacBook Air’s.

The Macbook Air is a great machine so I’m not surprised that people are moving from heavier models to the ultraportable lineup. I just wish the Air had a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, a black screen bezel, and a glowing keyboard, but that’s me being picky.

Apple looks to be developing a new bookmarking feature in Mac OS X Lion that allows users to select web content for reading later. The feature is called Reading List and appears to behave much like Instapaper and ReadItLater, but is currently disabled in Lion Developer Builds of Safari.

MacRumors found the following description that Apple offers for Reading List:

Reading List lets you collect webpages and links for you to read later. To add the current page to your Reading List, click Add Page. You can also Shift-click a link to quickly add it to the list. To hide and show Reading List, click the Reading List icon (eyeglasses) in the bookmarks bar.

Safari’s Reading List could simply be an extension of Safari Reader, a feature that has been in the web browser for a while. Reader strips web content from it’s origin webpage and places it in an overlaid easy to read format (it also skirts around paywalls sometimes).

There is some speculation that Reading List might sync bookmarked pages between your Mac and the iPhone or iPad for later reading, but there is currently no evidence to support this idea.

A nondescript update to Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 has been released to developers via Software Update. The description is only that it is “recommended for all users running Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2” and likely focuses on bug fixes and feature refinements.

The update brings Lion to build 11A444d, weighs in at 1.17GB, and is the second update that has been made available to Dev Preview 2. Also available is Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 4.

Direct download links to the package update files coming soon!

Long before the iPhone, there was… an Apple phone? I don’t know if this is real, if it was actually patented by Apple Inc, or if it was ever produced, but it certainly looks like someones brilliant high-tech idea from 1985. Who wouldn’t want to be talking into a flip apple phone?

For more retro Apple fun, check out the hilarious Apple Corporate video from 1984. Be sure to have your audio on for that one, because there’s even a theme song.

image via @AppleSpotlight

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines wondering why you should jailbreak your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you’re probably not alone. There’s plenty of reasons, but the video above lets us hear a few directly from Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, of Cydia fame. His main pitch is that jailbreaking gives you the freedom to do things outside of the normal scope of applications, including:

• 5 icons on your dock
• Cool animation customizations
• Quick access panels to settings
• Twitter client from a status bar
• Forward voicemail messages to other people as emails
• Custom lock screens
• Black keyboard vs white default
• iOS appearance themes

In other words, jailbreaking creates a tinkerers wonderland, allowing for thorough customization of the iOS interface and experience. If you watch the video, you’ll see a couple examples of these customizations in action, some are just pure eyecandy and others are genuinely useful enough that Apple should consider adopting them (forwarding voicemails, custom lockscreens, etc).

What app should you use to jailbreak? In the video, Saurik currently recommends using redsn0w (you can read a tutorial to jailbreak 4.3.2 with redsn0w here, it’s easy just follow the instructions).

The downsides to jailbreaking? You have to keep on top of iOS updates to make sure you don’t lose your jailbreak. Saurik recommends just waiting a few days until after an iOS update is released so that a jailbreak is available for the new version, which has been the standard jailbreaker approach for a while now. And no, jailbreaking is not illegal so there is nothing to worry about there.

For whatever reason, Saurik doesn’t mention carrier unlocking, but that’s also a common reason people jailbreak their iPhones in regions where hardware is sold locked by default. Unlocking is getting more and more challenging though, and current methods only apply to older firmware. The good news is that the GSM iPad 2 is unlocked regardless of where you buy it, and this may hint at a more liberalized approach to carrier locking in future versions of iPhone, or so we can hope.

Thanks to Parakeet for sending us the video via 9t5mac

Much like you can monitor Mac OS X filesystem usage through the command line, you can also discover what apps and individual processes are currently using your Macs internet connection. This is a really handy trick if you know your bandwidth is being used by something, or if you’re just trying to track down what applications or background processes are connecting to the outside world.

Read more »

You can instantly reveal the location of any item in the Mac Finder from an Open and Save dialog box by selecting the item and then hitting Command+R.

Read more »

The more iOS devices you get, the more sync and charger cables you have laying around, and the more you feel the pinch of only having so many USB ports. If you want to sync your iPad, you have to unplug your iPhone, if you want to sync your iPhone, you have to unplug your iPod touch, and so on. To ease this annoyance, there’s a few dual-link USB cables on the market now that let you sync multiple iOS devices at once (and some will dual charge, apparently). Here are two on Amazon:

• duaLink Dual Sync/Charge Cable for iPod and iPhone – $25.95
• XTG Dual iPhone / iPod Splitter Cable for $6.69

Two items with two price differences, you’ll have to be the judge here because I haven’t tried either of these yet but they definitely look useful if you’re juggling a handful of iPods and iPhones with only two USB ports.

The problem with some of the cables, as LifeHacker notes, is that some of the split cables will sync an iPad but not charge it due to the iPads increased power demands. I say some because if you read the product reviews on Amazon though, you’ll see that some users note that it does charge the iPad, and some say it doesn’t. It seems like this is due to only one side of the cable actually passing enough power to charge the device. Expect your mileage to vary, but if you don’t mind only charging one device at a time while syncing both, this could be a solution for you.

Apple and the iPad got a good roasting last night on the South Park season opener, the episode is called HumancentiPad and it’s full of crass humor. The episode rips on Apple, the iPhone tracking controversy, the iPad, Apple Geniuses, Apple Stores, the iTunes EULA, Steve Jobs presentation style, Best Buy, iPad competitors, and more. It’s outrageous, it’s gross, but it’s also funny.

If you missed it, you can watch the full episode online at SouthParkStudios website (no conceivable way to embed the video, sorry). If you’re easily offended or at work, you probably won’t want to watch, you’ve been warned.
Read more »

This won’t last long. A blatant rip-off of Super Mario Brothers has appeared for sale on the iOS App Store. Other than having slightly renamed characters, the game (called 莫尼诺拯救总动员 which translates roughly to “The Save Monino Story”), is practically identical to Super Mario Brothers. Here’s the ridiculous description:

The protagonist of this game named Monino, in the story of this game, Monino’s brother was captured by a monster named Bowler, he is on the road to Bowler’s castle to rescue his brother, a lot of monsters in different levels are waiting for him, would you like to join Monino’s rescue action? Go!

Monino? Bowler? The graphics? The gameplay? How did this get approved? I’m guessing this will disappear quick. Apple is usually very strict on this kind of thing, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks.

Mario Clone “Monino” is $0.99 and won’t last long (iTunes Store link)

Clearly there is an interest in retro NES and SNES games on the iOS platform, but it seems unlikely that Nintendo is going to jump onto iTunes anytime soon when they’re busy with their own competing gaming hardware. The only other option requires a jailbreak and using an SNES emulator for iPad or iPhone.

via @viticci

You can set the Mac Dock to only show actively running apps, making it perform a bit like a task manager rather than an application launcher.

This is a great trick if you prefer a minimalist Mac OS X desktop and Dock.

In order to set the Dock to only display currently active apps, you’ll need to use the command line with a defaults command string.

Read more »

Have you ever noticed that when you launch Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, before you can really use the app it often has to refresh the last active web page? This slows down your browsing, and while on newer hardware it doesn’t happen too often and it’s not a terribly long delay, on the iPhone 3G and older iPod touch it’s dreadfully slow.

A simple solution to speed up Safari in iOS is to load a blank page by bookmarking one, here’s how to do this:

• Tap on Safari to launch the app
• Tap onto the URL field and type “about:blank” and then choose “Open” – this loads a blank page in Safari
• Now tap on the bottom Share arrow icon and select “Add to Home Screen” to create a bookmark
• Label this something like “New Safari” and tap on “Add”

You’ll now find a blank white Safari icon on your iOS home screen, drag this to where ever you’ll use it (even the iOS dock to replace Safari if you want), and now when you tap on that white bookmark, Safari will load almost instantly since it no longer has to refresh the last visited page and instead it just loads a blank white page.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a great tip for older hardware in particular, especially anyone coping with the painfully slow experience of iOS 4+ on an iPhone 3G or an older iPod touch.

The only real downside is that the white icon isn’t as attractive as the Safari default icon, this can’t be changed unless you’re jailbroken.

This tip comes from MacWorld via Carlos, thanks for the submission!

We showed you how to read NYT articles for free using Google but if you have Safari there’s an even easier method: Safari Reader.

Read more »

The white iPhone 4 is finally being released tomorrow, April 28, in both a GSM and CDMA variety. This is about 10 months later than expected, but hey, better late than never right?

Phil Schiller says this about the fashionably late white iPhone finally arriving:

“The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful… …We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right.”

The unicorn will initially be available in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and the US, with more countries getting the white Phone soon after.

I’m not sure if the release of the white iPhone 4 is going to thrill enough people to be a big hit this late in a products cycle, but the iPhone 4 remains a great piece of hardware which is more than adequate for most users needs. On the other hand, I think most tech savvy individuals will probably just wait until Fall to get the next-gen iPhone, assuming the rumors hold true.

Apple has released a statement on the whole iPhone location tracking data hooplah, and in short, Apple is not tracking your location and has no plans to do so, the file you’re seeing is the result of a bug. These responses come from the press release, which is a 10 question long Q&A post, and it’s a worthwhile read if you’re concerned about this stuff.

You can read the full press release below, but it basically just says the location data is a cache file that is being stored for too long due to an iOS bug. That bug will be fixed in an upcoming software update. In the meantime, you can (and should) use encryption to prevent unauthorized access to location data – that’s not Apple’s recommendation that is mine.

I still think Apple should have just included an opt-in or opt-out setting instead and just turned this tracking thing into a feature, because I find the location mapping to be interesting and I’m sure others do too. It doesn’t look like that’s happening though. Read on for the full Q&A post from Apple:
Read more »

Getting specific information about iTunes & iOS App Store downloads is notoriously difficult, very few developers are candid enough to share download counts and the majority of developers guard download data for competitive reasons. If you’re curious how well a specific app in the iOS iTunes Store is selling, try using this quick and dirty formula to get a rough estimate of sales numbers:

Number of Ratings * 30 = Sales Estimate

This unscientific formula comes from the developer of River of News, a Google Reader app for iPad, who confirms the formula is reasonably accurate:

I found several sources independently say that about 1 in 30 buyers of a paid app will rate it in the store. I now have two apps in the store and that ratio has held up remarkably well.

I ran the formula on Angry Birds, and came up with six trillion quadrillion gazillion infinitiy downloads, which sounds about accurate. So the next time you start pouring money into iPhone app development, take a look at some of the apps out there and run the formula, it’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.

Update: fixed the link to the developer site.