Iphone | Technology Blog

Send MMS With The iPhone

September 16th, 2008

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The designers and developers of the Apple iPhone must somehow have missed the popularity of MMS, the Multimedia Messaging Service, which is basically a service to send multimedia messages to contacts. This is one of the criticisms that iPhone users and reviewers had when using and reviewing the iPhone. The iPhone is capable of sending SMS so why the exclusion of MMS in first place? This would make perfect sense considering that the iPhone could make use of the phone’s inbuilt camera and the Internet as a picture source.

Flutter, a free application for the iPhone, adds MMS functionality to the iPhone. The application is available at the Apple iPhone store from where it can be downloaded and installed.

There are a few fundamental differences between the usual MMS service that cell phone providers offer and Flutter. On the positive side Flutter users can use the geotagging features of the iPhone and include those information in their message. That can be nice for sending holiday pictures where the recipient can look the location up on a map to know where the sender is currently located.

Utilize iPhone As A Modem

September 12th, 2008

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Mac only. The iPhone can be used to browse the Internet, write emails and do pretty much everything that one can do on the Internet. It is great for those quick activities that require little user input but writing articles for websites takes some time due to the character input method.

Many users prefer a keyboard anytime over the way the iPhone handles text input because that is what they are used to. The software iPhoneModem utilizes the iPhone as a modem for a computer so that the computer can go online.

There are several scenarios besides having to type more than a few paragraphs like running a software that is not available on the iPhone itself. iPhoneModem works with all jail broken iPhones 2G and 3G over EDGE and UMTS and Mac OS X 10.5.0 or higher with Mac OS X 10.5.4 recommended.

The iPhone Home Button Is A Security Risk

September 12th, 2008

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Now that makes for an interesting opening. When a user presses the iPhone’s home button it shrinks and disappears which is a nice looking effect. The problem is that the iPhone is taking a screenshot of the screen contents to create that effect. The screenshot can be of anything including emails, sms, notes, contacts or websites.

The screenshots get deleted after the application is closed and most users would think that this is the end of the story but there is a twist according to security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski who was able to recover deleted screenshots that would show him exactly what a user was doing at a given time.

This however is not the only privacy risk. Everything that gets at least temporarily stored on the could be recoverable including keyboard and Safari cache, deleted emails and pictures.

Create Free Ringtones In iTunes

August 9th, 2008

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The Apple blog published a nice article explaining how to create free ringtones using only the Apple iTunes software. The only restriction of that method is that the song needs to reside on the hard drive of the user so that a ringtone can be created from it.

The method is pretty straightforward but requires a bit of manual work. Start by right-clicking the song in iTunes that you want to create a ringtone from and select Get Info from the context menu. Click on the Options tab in the new window and pick a start and stop time for the ringer. It has to be exactly 30 seconds or less so consider this. Click Ok when you are done.

Now right-click the song and select Convert Selection to AAC from the menu. Now open your iTunes music library and drag and drop the newly created song to another location on the hard drive and delete the song in the iTunes library.

Apple Can Remove Apps From iPhones

August 7th, 2008

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The public outcry would be loud and clear if someone would have discovered that Microsoft was able to remove installed applications from a Windows operating system. But it is Apple this time who is able to remove applications that have already been installed on an iPhone according to the website Macrumors.

How is that working? Apple is managing a page with blacklisted applications. Researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has a theory that the iPhone is calling home once in a while to check the installed applications against the Apple maintained blacklist.

This could mean that Apple could deauthorize commercial applications that the user paid for. This could ensure the security and safety of their users but it is more a question of how strict they will use the blacklist. Putting a safe application on that list could have serious consequences for the users and Apple.

First iPhone App Pulled from Apple App Store

July 28th, 2008

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It was just a matter of time until the news would break that an application that has been offered on the Apple App Store was raising security or privacy concerns. Even Mozilla with their high quality controls let some bad apples slip through so it was just a matter of time.

The time has come apparently because the iPhone game Aurora Feint has been pulled from the Apple store due to privacy and security reasons. Here is why..

The developers of the game thought that it would be a cool feature to transfer his complete contact list to the game server to find out if any of his friends are playing the game itself. The contact list was transferred unencrypted (of course) and anyone with a little bit of knowledge could have gained those information easily.