iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Flash support has always (according to some people, painfully) been missing from the iOS platform. In the article below, I explain how you can watch any kind of Flash videos (via SkyFire) and how you can use full(!) Flash (and even Silverlight!) applications on your iPad (via AlwaysOnPC). All this without having to jailbreak!

Pure Flash videos

Unfortunately, Apple's official support for Bluetooth devices is pretty weak. Keyboard support is limited (not all otherwise, with third-party "hacks", usable models are supported) and there's no true game controller / mouse / external GPS support at all.

Fortunately, there are a lot of utilities in Cydia (accessible from any jailbroken iDevice) that provide help in using these devices.

Today, I've played a bit with printing right from iOS devices (iDevices for short).

As you may know, Apple's own solution, AirPrint, is compatible with only few printers, all from HP. (Fortunately, no longer only the [in my humble opinion] lowly and unreliable inkjets are supported, but also LaserJets, but still: there's still no support for other manufacturers' gear and not even HP's own, older models.)

Needless to say, the two printers I tried to print to, a Samsung MI-2525w and an HP LaserJet 1320, aren't supported either.

Summertime is vacation time. And if you use campgrounds when you're vacationing, you'll want to check out Woodall’s RV & Camping Copilot (free). It lists more than 12,000 private and public campgrounds and RV parks in the United States and Canada, plus Mexico. It offers campground information, including amenities, services, types of campsites, on-site recreation, as well as identifying many camping discounts offered at parks. Private campgrounds also include Woodall's 5W/5W Rating System.

I like to write about novel uses of the iOS camera, and here's yet another astonishing instance: an app that lets you measure the speed of cars, boats, skaters, skiers, cyclists, running dogs, model cars, tennis serves, baseball pitches, soccer free-kicks — and anything that can be recorded by the video camera. Version 3.0 of speecClock - velocity radar ($0.99) was just released, adding the ability to measure small objects such as a tennis ball or baseball.

In my humble opinion the term “adventure game” has become too broad these days.  I see some sites even try to classify an FPS as an adventure game.  To me it is games like the King’s Quest series from Sierra or Zork from Infocom that defines the adventure game genre.  Games that require you to really explore your surroundings, solve many puzzles, and quite often interact with dozens of non-player characters in more than just a “pardon me while I shoot you” capacity.  Cryptic Keep certainly strives for the feel of the classics, though the distinct lack of NPCs and very little story save snippets at the beginning and the end make it feel more like Myst than a true adventure game.  Still, I appreciate that developers are trying to reinvigorate the genre, and it was fun while it lasted.

(Beware: highly technical article! If you aren't a programmer and/or don't want to see how my backup / restore algorithm works, step right to the last two chapters, starting with "Important note for 3G S users"!)

I've made a lot of pretty advanced resolution tests today to find out the effective (real) resolution of my iPhone 4 and 3G S hacks and enhancements.

For this, I've used the well-known ISO 12233 resolution chart available HERE for printing / ordering. Please read THIS (additional info in THIS / THIS / THIS article) in order to be able to correctly understand how the frame grabs should be evaluated.
Having dug deep into the configuration files and the video “hacking” of the iPhone 3G S (see my yesterday's post HERE [beware, it's quite technical and mostly meant for advanced users / programmers]; I'll also very soon post a full all-in-one 3G S article for beginners), I've found the „1080p” settings I've used there applicable to the iPhone 4 too – in addition to the default (here: true HD with full frame rate, near field-of-view and bad low-light performance) and the full sensor (high-resolution video with great low-light performance and, on the iPhone 4, greatly widened field-of-view but severely reduced frame rate).

I've just uploaded version 1.4 of my free(!), open-source(!) iPhone 3G S video recorder enhancer tool to Cydia. As usual, add the repository „http://www.winmobiletech.com/cy” or „http://winmobiletech.com/cy” to your Cydia client and download the new version from my repository. When the development is finally finished, I'll make the two programs be available in traditional Cydia repositories so that you don't need to access it from my private repository.

Main changes in this version:

New version (1.1) of iPhone 3G S Video Enhancer uploaded to Cydia, with the following changes:

- CameraRollValidator.plist and MediaValidator.plist are now granted a+w in the app delegate, which means you may not end up having to use iFile to set permissions manually, which means you will be able to play back the high-resolution videos right on your phone, and not only on a desktop computer. (This was missing from v1.0; see the related discussion HERE)

- I've reworked the previously iPhone 4-specific help text (third tab) and the label (first tab)

The video recorder of the iPhone 3G S can heavily be enhanced. As opposed to the iPhone 4, where the main enhancements are “only” making the field-of-view much wider, the data rate selectable and, with pixel binning, the low-light performance much better (by sacrificing some resolution and speed), the enhancements of the 3G S camera, in addition to the better low-light performance through pixel-binning, are waaaay superior: you can greatly increase the resolution, almost to the level of the iPhone 4 or traditional cameras.

(Note that this article, as with most of my stuff, shows you not only how the camera can be reconfigured, but also shows you - how you can play back a YouTube video frame-by-frame; - how you can create and upload packages to your Cydia [an alternative to Apple's AppStore] repository and, last but definitely not least, gives you a full source-level explanation of the entire app that I've written to quickly switch between the different iPhone4 camera configurations. No one has released anything similar for the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 3GS [for which I'll also release a very similar utility in a few days] before!)

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