I wrote about the jailbreak of my iPhone two days ago and after a trial an error process I discovered the top 5 applications I was really missing on the iPhone.
1. SBSettings
2. Stacks
3. GriP
4. Multifl0w
5. Orbit
These are all brilliant apps and I would recommend to test them. One app that is not available is ShapeWriter or to be correct the swype technology which I think would be a perfect jailbreak project to get this running with the iPhone virtual keyboard in every application.
Today, I did a Jailbreak with blackra1n on my iPhone with iPhone OS 3.1.2 and it was really easy and took only 3 minutes from starting the process on my Mac and finally installing Cydia on my phone. The reason why I did this, wasn’t really that I was missing an application or feature on my iPhone, but the desire to customize a few things. Cydia is a really simple solution, based on APT (Debian Package Management System) to access repositories with applications, themes, addons etc. and I used it to install Winterboard (Customization application), SBSetting (sophisticated access to iPhone settings and functions), Categories (a solution to create application folders on your homes screen) and some themes (including Matte UI, which is I think a little bit better then the UI elements from Apple). So, as you can see on the screenshots I got a lot of addtional functionality and a very clean UI. I know that Apple doesn’t like this customization process and I have to admit, that these themes and elemets are designed from some pretty good designers, with a lot of experience, but maybe Apple can learn from that. For example the easy access to SBSettings, by swipping at the top of screen is easy and very powerfull. There is also a pretty nice Stacks implementation, which I think is awsome for all those like me, who have multiple home screens with a lot of Apps. I will continue to buy Apps in the App-Store, because I really believe in fairuse and fairness, but for additional features I probably will jail break my iPhone in the future again.
Ok, there are really only a few updates, but not all new devices. It is a straight forward development and it looks like that video is next big thing for Apple with the iPod Nano. I like it, but I am a little bit surprised that the iPod Touch was not updated. Everyone expected a camera and it was only logical it terms of the target market segment for the Touch. I can only guess that this decision was a result of the rumored technical problems with the camera. But the price of $199 or €189 is pretty nice for the christmas season and they will sell a lot of them. Gaming seems the other great big thing for Apple 
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So, use WaterRoof .
WaterRoof is an open source application for Mac OS X (10.4 and later) and lets you control most of the function of the built-in ipfw firewall. It is for everyone who needs a little bit more then just the application level firewall settings that come with OSX. I think it is a very good solution for Mac OS X Server, because bandwidth management and dynamic rules are not built-in.
Google recently introduced Google Domestic Trends as a collection of various indexes of search trends. It is maybe a really good way to predict certain developments for example unemployment, because employees maybe search for related topics in a situation the company is not doing well.
I am really glad to have access to the beta program of Kodiak and I like this cool looking way of managing my virtual machines. It is a very early version of the AIR application, but it has a great potential in my eyes, especially because there is no VMware vSphere Client for OSX available. And if you have a look at Adobe AIR, you should also have a look at the new Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash Catalyst here.
in a galaxy far, far away…
It has been quite some time since I wrote an article on my blog or updated my website. But there were many other things on my agenda for the last months and even more for the coming. I am in the process of writing my final thesis about social innovators and their impact on technology policy. There is also a lot to do as research student for the GSBC – EIC, some other projects that take some for from time to time and then in the next month there is a position as tutor that requires a little bit of preparation. So, I hope from time to time I can write a article about some interesting things.
Oh, one little update…I am planing of doing something for the Nitro-V3 Project and Newton. Also I am very addicted to the Cherokee Web Server and JRuby on Rails on Google App Engine. I also upgraded my server hardware to a new IBM X3250 with quad core proccessor, 8GB memory, two 147gb and two 73gb sas drives running with VMware ESXi 4.0. In context with ESXi, you can have a look at Kodiak very nice Adobe AIR project.
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Some things that are missing on the iPad
After using my iPad for 5 days, it is time to write a short review about the device. First, it is a brilliant piece of hard- and software. The applications are very sophisticated and I can do most of my work on the iPad, using Pages, Keyenote, iSSH, Desktop, Omnigraffle etc.. But there are also some things missing. For example an mute-button like on the iPhone, the clock app and especially the calculator are missing. I hope Apple will fix this in the next couple of months. But in my opinion, it is the next big thing.