Das HeikoBlog

The One Killer Feature that makes you want to Jailbreak your iPhone

I am often asked by fellow iPhone owners why someone would be willing to mess with the already perfect OS of a perfect smartphone and go through the hassle of jailbreaking it.

When I face this question and start talking about the various apps and tools I frequently use that cannot be downloaded and installed from Apple's AppStore, the person in front of me puts down most points, often because the specific tool/app solves a problem these people simply do not have (which is fine) or because it is not so important to justify a jailbreak (which is also fine).

These discussions often cause me to revisit my own decision process and sometimes actually I wonder  why I did it and never turned back. The reason is: there are too many small little details and additional functions that I simply do not want to miss anymore. There is no one big "killer feature", only a (large) collection of smaller points.

I will try to list as many of these points as possible in a new article series. The one thing I am going to start with is QuickGold, which is a Springboard extension that has the power to help you managing the tons of applications that fill up your home screen.

QuickGold has no own icon, it is started by pressing the Home button when you are already on the Home screen. A new screen appears almost immediately:

This screen will allow you to search for a variety of things on your phone: Applications, Bookmarks, SMS messages (full text search), Safari History, Web Clips and Contacts. I mainly use it for searching for applications, and this really helps me managing my applications on my iPhone.

Most of you will end up with 7+ home screen pages after a while, simply because there are so many useful and interesting applications (even in AppStore!) to play and work with. The problem for me is that I have a ton of apps that I do not use very often. Finding one of these rarely used apps on the various home screen pages is bothering me, because I have to swipe here and swipe there in order to find it. With QuickGold, this comes to a sudden (and happy) end: Just press the home button and start typing the name of the app (something I remember most of the time) and a list appears where you can start the required app by just tapping on its entry in the search result. Here is an example for "ebay" which brought up two results (a web clip and the actual application):

This little small extension already saved hours of searching and thousands of swipes for me and is one good reason to jailbreak your phone. Give it a try, there is always a way back and I never ever met someone who managed to brick his phone when trying to jailbreak it.

Springboard crashes: Adding and Deleting web clips to Home Screen

One annoying problem turned up after I updated my firmware to 2.2.1 : Whenever I try to add or remove a web clip or bookmark to my home screen, Springboard crashes immediately. Sometimes it will come back in Safe Mode and sometimes it just restarts. Then the icon for a webclip I tried to add is there, but when it crashes while I try to delete/remove such a web icon, the icon itself is still there after the restart.

I have quite a large collection of different extensions running, including SBSettings, Winterboard, QuickSMS, iRealQuickSMS, QuickGold, Backgrounder, MyProfiles and Intelliscreen. Each of these could be causing this and since this is not a complete show stopper, it will take me a while to figure out which of them is responsible for the crashes.

If you have an idea, please let me know.

Updating my jailbroken iPhone

Last time I updated the firmware of my (already jailbroken) iPhone was when I went from 2.1 up to 2.2 and this definitely was not a pleasant experience. I ended up having to setup everything - and I mean everything - from scratch. Back then my prime fault was - as it turned out in the middle of the process - that I used Categories.

Categories is a very useful app that allows you to sort your applications into category folders, that means you can put the iPod and iTunes apps into a "Music" folder and they disappear from your home screen. If you want to start them, you need to tap on your "Music" folder and Categories will present you its contents on a new, separate screen. This is one of my favourite jailbreak-enabled apps, because it considerably helps cleaning up your home screen.

The problem with Categories was that I moved Cydia into a "Tools and Setup" Folder I had created and after I finished jailbreaking my freshly restored 2.1 iPhone, I restored my last backup to get back all my data and settings. You can imagine my surprised look when I found out that this also restored the "hidden" status of all apps that I placed into Categories folders, including but not limited to Cydia and the Installer (another appstore alternative for installing software).

I was sitting there and tried to resolve what science calls a typical hen-and-egg problem. When the jailbreaking process finished, I had only Cydia and Installer on my phone, no settings and no other applications. In order to get back my data, I had to restore from a backup which took away Cydia and that left me without the ability to get back my Categories app to "unhide" Cydia ....

Well, as already mentioned I finally ended up starting from scratch and set up a reminder to myself to not put Cydia into a Categories folder anymore, never never never.

Now, this time I wanted to avoid starting from scratch. In the meantime I had purchased a considerable amount of non-AppStore apps, including Intelliscreen, Swirly MMS, iRealQuickSMS, MyProfile and so on. I also set up my phone to represent what I consider my perfect mobile companion, hours and hours of fine tuning tons of apps and extensions and I really, really, really (and I mean really) did not want to loose this again.

I remembered that the last fiasco was partly caused by my bad preparations, I used AptBackup to save a list of all Cydia-installed applications ... but since I could not use the iTunes Backup (due to my "hidden Cydia" problem) I was not able to get the Apt Backup data back on the phone and therefore had to reinstall everything manually.

This time I used Apt Backup before I started the update procedure and I double checked that the iPhone was completely synchronized and backed up by iTunes before I used the same iTunes to update from 2.2 to 2.2.1 ... After the update process finished, I ran QuickPawn 2.2.5-2 to jailbreak it. This left me with a non-working iPhone, it never made it through the boot process and was caught in an endless loop, indicated by the Apple logo and the double-vibrate signal.

I recalled that the update from 2.1 to 2.2 resulted in exactly the same situation and could only be resolved by doing a complete recovery with iTunes. In order to do this, I had to power off the phone (using the famous hold-the-HomeButton-and-Power-Button process) and then put it into maintenance mode (press and hold Home until you see the USB connector and iTunes picture).

Then iTunes correctly found a phone in maintenance mode and offered to reinstall 2.2.1 on it. When this finished I was offered to set it up as a completely new phone or to restore it from a backup. I skipped this at this time because I first wanted to jailbreak it. The following QuickPwn run showed no problems (well, to be honest the first one also said that it was "successful") and my iPhone booted into 2.2.1 with Cydia on the Home Screen, nice!

Now, next thing I did was restoring the phone from backup and after I finished this, I got back a large chunk of my apps plus all regular settings. In order to get back the rest of my Cydia-based apps, I first updated Cydia itself and then installed Apt Backup. After using its "Restore" function, I had back all my my non-AppStore apps including my beloved Winterboard theme, Intelliscreen and SBSettings. Wonderful!

It looks like I lost my Categories settings, meaning I had to re-create all my folders and sort my apps into them - remember not to do this with Cydia - and a final Synchronization run with iTunes brought back my AppStore-based apps and the Music and Video stuff I use to carry around with me. The non-Appstore apps I purchased all tried to recover a license at their first start and all of them completed this process sucessfully, leaving me with fully working and licensed applications. for the Intelliborn stuff (Intelliscreen and MyProfiles) I had to re-enter my "Rock ID", but afterwards the license data was retrieved without problems. Neat!

So, all in all not too bad. The lost Categories data is not nice and I sincerely hope the developer manages to include this into the regular iTunes backup - as most apps seem to do nowadays. There is probably still some work to do for me to manually recover settings for other apps without iTunes backup support, but the majority of things already looks and feels familiar.

If you wonder why I went through this for a minor update (2.2 to 2.2.1) when 3.0 is already appearing on the horizont: I found out that more and more apps need 2.2.1 to work, for example Crazy Machines (which I could not purchase in the AppStore because it requires 2.2.1) and Byline (I could not install the 2.5 update because it also requires 2.2.1 to run).

But now I feel prepared for the 3.0 update and I am really looking forward to updating my iPhone once again. But bumping the major version number is probably much harder than this piece-of-cake-minor-childsplay update from 2.2 to 2.2.1 ...

iPhone + Linux = Productivity (Part 2)

Ok, I was busy with messing with my iPhone and the 2.2 Update, but I feel that I am back on track now. In the first part I described a little bit what I am looking for when it comes to actually use your smart phone in a serious way. My central point is synchronization. I need to be able to access my information (including calendar data, contacts and email) whereever I go and work, including my iPhone and my various private and corporate PCs. And I need OTA sync, of course. No offline "sync when we are at home next time" type of thing, if I enter an appointment in my phone, walk in the door, sit down at my desk and open Thunderbird, I want to see that new appointment without having to fire off a dedicated sync software or - worst case - use a USB cable.

When I fiddled around with the iPhone I soon found out that it basically offers all the synchronization stuff with its MS Exchange integration. The problem is: I am a Linux guy, I have access to a number of Windows PCs but my main machine(s) are running Ubuntu. And, I do not have an Exchange server which I can mess around with ... and I do not want to :-)

First idea: Trying to "sync with the cloud"

I created an MS Exchange Account with my ISP (who offers this kind of scary thing) for quite some money. I also tried out mobileMe but both solutions have a big drawback: No Linux client software. I already mentioned that I am using Mozilla Thunderbird, mainly because it is available on both Linux and Windows and because of its crazy genius plug in capabilities. I will probably elaborate more on all the "add ons" I use in a separate post. But this was a big problem, I could not use Outlook on Linux (which is probably a good thing^tm) and I simply did not find anything that would deal nice with an Exchange server.

Second negative point: All my private data would be in the hands of the company that runs the server. Although I am not paranoid, I would want to avoid that if ever possible.

Having your own Exchange server on Linux is fortunately not entirely impossible. A company called Communigate Software offers a powerful communication server software called Communigate Pro. And guess what? They offer a free version called "Community Edition" which supports up to 5 accounts and is limited to private users (AFAIK - please check out their license terms and conditions).

Communigate Pro is not only a mail server software, it is a full featured enterprise-grade collaboration and communication system. I am not affiliated in any way with them and I am sure I only use 1% of the features that this software offers, but it really looks pretty sophisticated. What I especially like about it is the multi-platform approach. It can run on an impressive list of different OS, including Linux and Solaris.

Now, for my specific requirements all I need was the contacts and calendar sync capabilities. And CGPro offers Push OTA synchronization with your iPhone for these out of the box - great stuff.

I installed CGPro using the tarball and then went to the administration web GUI which is running on port 8010 and, SSL-protected, on port 9010. The installation was pretty straightforward and I was easily able to set up a new domain and my first (and only - so far) mail account. Since I initially did not find a way to connect my Thunderbird eMail client with the CGPro server, I started with using the web mail interface of CGPro to create and edit my contacts and calendar entries on my PCs. The mail interface can be reached at port 8100 (HTTP) and 9100 (HTTPS) and offers a number of different themes and layouts to choose from. An Adobe AIR enabled client is also available, adding a little bit of convenience to the UI by allowing drag-and-drop stuff and other gimmicks.

One important thing: So far I did not set up CGPro as my mail server in terms of IMAP mail. But I am able to access the mailbox of my account via IMAP and already played around with it a little bit. I see no problems to use this as your primary mail server, it offers central mail filtering rules and can poll POP mailboxes (they call this RPOP). You can setup a number of POP3 feeds and therefore can combine more than one mailbox with your CGPro account.

Short note: I am using the German interface with CGPro, I tried to translate the menu and option names back into English, so please do not freak out if you do not find an option or menu entry that exactly matches my description. Look out for something that could mean the same thing and do not forget to let me know,  I will change my article accordingly.

In order to get OTA Sync with my iPhone, I created an MS Exchange account on it with these settings:
EMail: youraccount@yourdomain.blabla
Server: yourserver:8100
Domain: (empty)
Username: youraccount@yourdomain.blabla
Password: (your CGPro account password)

If you want to use an encrypted connection, please use port 9100 instead and enable the "Use SSL" switch.

If you face difficulties with connecting to your CGPro server, you can try it with the web interface first. Just point a browser to yourserver:8100 and you should see the login screen. If you do not, please check that your CGPro server is actually running (it will start a ton of identical looking daemon processes on your server, because for each of the different services like IMAP, POP, FTP, HTTP it runs exactly the same binary). If it runs, you should check your firewall settings and, if you are running this behind a  router, check the port forwarding rules on your router and make sure that you setup a rule that will forward whatever port you want to port 8100 or 9100 of your CGPro host. If you do not use 8100/9100 as your external port, you obviously need to modify the settings on your iPhone (and use that port for your web interface test, too).

I faced three difficulties with my setup:
a) I received an "Unknown Domain" error message stating that this server does not provide Web Services for the requested domain. Solution: The domain name I chose for my CGPro domain was not the domain name I used for accessing the server from the Internet. I soon found out that I needed to add a statement "externaldomain = cgdomain" where "externaldomain" the external domain name of your server is and "cgdomain" the name of the domain as you have created it in CGPro. This can be done in the "Settings" / "Router" part of the admin web interface.

b) when I tried to login to the web interface of my CGPro server over an Internet connection, it kicked me back to the login screen pretty often. I found out that this was due to the changing IP address on my side (in our company we use a round robin sort of load balancing on our outgoing DSL Internet connections) and could be solved by using the "Disable Fixed Address Check" checkbox on the login screen.

c) everytime I restarted my CGPro server, it created a new certificate which actually resulted in errors and warnings on the iPhone and when trying to access the web interface using Firefox. I was able to resolve this by creating my own certificate on the "User" / "Domains" / [yourdomain] / "Security" / "SSL/TLS" screen of the admin web interface. Please make sure that "PKI Services" is changed from "Default (Test)" to "On" after you created your own certificate. The "Default(test)" setting leads to the described behavior, i.e. a new test certificate is created every time you (re)start CGPro.

As I already mentioned, this allowed me to sync my iPhone OTA with my own central server, the only thing that was left is integration into Mozilla Thunderbird / Lightning. Fortunately CGPro already has CalDAV support and you can easily add your CGPro calendars to Thunderbird/Lightning by creating a remote calendar with this address:
http://yourdomain:8100/CalDAV/yourcalendarname

You need to change the port number to your external port number, of course. When asked for user id and password, simply use your CGPro account name (plus the full domain, e.g. "heiko@mycgpro.domain") and your regular CGPro password.

Great, we now have calendar data synch'ed between our iPhone and our Thunderbird eMail client (with the Lightning extension). What else? Oh, yes. Contacts. I did not find out how to sync my contacts between the iPhone and the Thunderbird address book, but a colleague of mine found the solution for me in form of a TB add-on (what else) called SyncCGP ... Now, unfortunately this add-on seems to be an unofficial add-on, because it is not available on the regular TB Add-On site. I recalled the general appearance of the Add On, it looked quite similiar to SyncKolab and seems to be a modified version made by Niversoft.

The download link is here:
CGPro Sync for Thunderbird

This add on requires you to create an IMAP mail account for accessing your CGPro account from within Thunderbird. You can then use this extension to sync an addressbook and a calendar with one of the IMAP folders (the ones that represent the Calendar and Contacts folders of your CGPro Account).

So, at this point I have a running configuration that allows me to synchronize my iPhone with my various Thunderbird installations, including calendar and contacts data. I personally use an external IMAP mail account for the email messages, but I see no problems to use eMail with the CGPro software as well and I will definitely try to change my setup as soon as I have more time.

Any questions? Please feel free to send me your comments!

Jailbroken Firmware Update - An Adventure

Only a few days after Apple officially released their 2.2 Firmware for my iPhone 3G I found out that QuickPwn has been released by the iPhone Dev Team and although I did not see a lot of hard reasons for  upgrading my jailbroken phone, I was tempted to try out Google Street View and the AppStore enhancements and therefore I decided to give it a try.

The biggest problem I spotted was how to preserve the current, nearly perfect setup of my device which finally let me sync all my calendar data and contacts with the various desktop PCs. I also installed quite a bunch of different applications both from the AppStore and using Cydia and while I was confident that the "official" apps and their settings would be preserved by the iTunes backup facitlity, I was not so sure about the "unofficial" apps I had (like Swirly MMS, Quickgold, Categories, biteSMS, Cycorder, Intelliscreen, Boss Prefs...).

Now, I found two backup tools in Cydia which I identified as a possible solution for this: Apt-Backup (which basically saves a list of all applications/packages you installed via Cydia) and Chronus, which backs up data from various applications.

One thing I am using quite heavily is Categories, which allows you to sort your Appliccations into "Folders" instead of having them all on the varios home screen pages. This dramatically cleans up the whole home screen space and I do not even need to open the folders to start one of the apps that reside in it, because with QuickGold I can start any application by simply typing the beginning of its name into the search field. Much faster and simpler, but this caught me after the update. How? Read on ...

I backed up my list of installed Cydia packages with Apt-Backup and the settings/docs of all my imporant "unofficial" apps with Chronus before I findally synch'ed my phone with iTunes in preparation for my first attempt to use the new QuickPwn for 2.2 ... First I had to install the 2.2 Firmware update using iTunes and then I wanted to wipe the phone and (re-)jailbreak it with QuickPwn.

Then came the shock: After the phone restarted, I was missing most of my icons and quickly found out that this was caused by Categories which "hides" the icons of apps that have been sorted into one of its folders. This "hidden" status is preserved even after a firmware update, but now I did not have the tools to bring the affected icons back to light, because I neither had Categories nor QuickGold to access the hidden apps.

Now, not a big deal I thought, I just jailbreak my phone using QuickPwn and then install QuickGold which allows me to launch any application, no matter whether it is hidden or not, by its name. And I can reinstall Categories in order to set up my folders again and put the apps where they belong.

Using QuickPwn was straightforward as it always was and I eagerly waited for my beloved iPhone to reboot after finishing the process and restoring it from the iTunes backup. It did and I went on to fire up Cydia to install QuickGold. But wait ... where is the Cydia icon? Oh, I see. It was also sorted into one of the "Categories" folders and therefore is flagged as "hidden". This "hidden" status seems to have been stored in my iTunes backup and therefore all the icons including Cydia disappeared when I chose "Restore phone from Backup" after jailbreaking it.

Nice, now what can you do if you need Cydia to install QuickGold to start Cydia to install Categories to unhide your apps or at least make them accessible again? Oh boy, I did another "wipe" action and this time looked a little bit deeper into the possibilities of "setting this up as a new phone" and "Restoring from Backup" when the "recover" process finished. I finally figured it out that you do not need to choose one or the other, you can simply leave your phone as it is and jailbreak it while it is in this clean, new baby-like state. I got back my Cydia icon afterwards and was able to install QuickGold, Categories and a few other things.  After I installed QuickGold, I restored my phone from the iTunes backup and got all my Appstore-delivered apps as well as the general setup for sync and stuff back. Phew!

Now, on to get things back to normal by using the two cited backup applications for restoring all the apps and settings that are not available via the AppStore and which obviously have not been restored by iTunes. And this, my friends, was a complete failure. When I fired off Apt-Backup after installing it with Cydia, it told me that it cannot restore nuthin' because I need to run it right after I reset and restored my phone from Backup. It seems that I was not allowed to install anything from Cydia (besides Apt Backup) before I try to restore and I really, really wonder why that is. I assumed that Apt-Backup simply stores a list of all installed deb packages in a safe place (where it is picked up during an iTunes sync process) and use this list to install all packages which are missing. I was not expecting too much, because I can imagine that this is most likely an error-prone process but the sheer fact that this Backup app did not even try it and simply said "no, I am not doing it" puzzled me. I did not note down the list of apps I installed but I think I got back almost everything I had before the update, but it took me quite a while.

Now, on to Chronus and restoring the settings of my apps. This was disappointing as well, but mainly because my most important apps were not supported by it: SwirlyMMS, biteSMS, Intelliscreen, Categories

I would hope that there will be a way to backup the "unofficial" stuff before the next firmware update, at least I will try to figure out how to get a list of all installed deb packages from within an SSH shell. But I would hope for some sort of a standard way of backing up data for the Cydia supplied apps. Why not tell every package that is in the Cydia repositories to name a list of files that should be backed up by Chronus or some other Cydia-internal backup process. And why not let Cydia create a list of all installed packages directly which can be backed up using the very same functionality.

Please do not get me wrong: I am more than thankful for all what the Dev Team and Saurik have been done so far and I would not want to ask them for more. But I am confident that this usability issue will be taken care of sooner or later.

iPhone + Linux = Productivity

Introduction

I finally managed to complete my whole calendar/contacts/mail setup on all my machines and it works like a charm. If you are a Linux user and own an iPhone, you are probably trying to set up something that allows you to enter an appointment using your phone and find it correctly stored in the calendar of your desktop PC when you return. This article is about how I solved this puzzle.

History
or
My Personal Digital Assistant Track Record

I am a typical Linux user and I have Ubuntu Linux installed on all machines I personally use. That includes our home server, my home and office desktop workstations, my private laptop (Acer Aspire One) and my corporate laptop. Both the machines I use at work are dual booting Ubuntu and Win XP, but my private systems are Linux only. The PC of my wife and the kid's PC are both running XP, they either need a specific application they cannot give up or they want to play games, how boring :-)

Now, I am a long time Palm OS based PDA user, my first Palm was a IIIx, followed by a V and a M501. When cell phones started to penetrate the market I abandoned Palm and went through the whole set of cell phone manufacturers: Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, you name it. I finally returned to the Palm camp when I got me a Treo 680, a wonderful device which really put me back into productivity mode and was my first real smartphone since it combined a cell phone with the power of a PDA, fantastic! Unfortunately the look and feel of the Treo was not pretty, it was quite a clumsy piece of hardware and the Palm OS user interface was not only ugly but also delivered this late-eighties feeling.

Back in my Palm days I managed to keep my home and work PC perfectly in sync (mainly calendar entries and contacts). Mails were always a PITA with the old Palm OS and although the Treo did a much better job, it still felt clumsy and was dead slow and barely readable. Since I was using Windows back then on all my machines (besides Linux), I used third party sync software to update my PDAs with the data I entered into my corporate Groupwise account and vice versa. Using GW at home did work to some extend but was not really gold standard due to the missing Netware server.

The Problem

I want to be able to create, edit and delete appointments in a calendar, contact data and emails on all involved machines (which include Linux and Windows PCs and Laptops as well as my iPhone 3G). That includes repeating calendar entries like birthdays. I want to be able to do everything on every piece of hardware (on dual boot machines, this means all installed OS platforms), I want to avoid having a data entry system and a bunch of read-only access points. That means full bidirectional synchronization, everywhere.

My solution

I work with several PCs and laptops, all are either Linux-only or dual boot Linux and Windows XP. The email and collaboration client I chose for this is Mozilla Thunderbird, it is available on both required OS platforms and offers a broad range of plug-ins/add-ons which add functionality to the client. The client side was pretty easy to find out, since I already used Thunderbird for emails and occasionally checked out Lightning, the Add On that adds a powerful calendar and to-do management feature set to Thunderbird. I tried out Evolution (when I had my Palm Treo) but never liked it as much as I love Thunderbird, mainly because of the large Add On collection of TB.

The back-end and data storage part of this setup was not so easy to find. I checked out MobileMe and an offer from a German ISP for an Exchange account, both solutions cost money and result in having your data stored on someone else's server, which is something I wanted to avoid - if ever possible.

The same reason kept me from trying out Google Calendar and Google Mail and although I at least peeked into the calendar functions of Google, I finally decided that I wanted to stay in control when it comes to my data.

A colleague at work finally pointed me to Communigate Pro, a powerful commercial mail and collaboration server software that runs on almost every popular OS like Windows, Linux and Solaris. It is available for free in a so-called "Community Edition", the only limitation I know of is that you cannot set up more than five accounts. No big deal, the thing is there for me alone, so one account basically covers it for me.

More on the details of setting this up later ... stay tuned!

Design Roulette

I apologize if anyone looking at my blog today was shocked because of the design and layout changes. I played around with the overall design and applied some of the available templates provided by Type Pad. I think I will stick around with this grey one for a while.

AppStore Relaunch: What needs to be changed

The AppStore is a nice and easy way to add applications to my iPhone, I almost excusively use it from the phone and do not purchase/install apps from within iTunes (which runs on the Windows PC of my wife, since I am a Linux user). AppStore is nice but far from being perfect, here's why:

1. No trial mode
   I think it is mandatory that you are able to try out software before you buy it. If I purchase something from Amazon, no matter whether it is a book or a new laptop, I can send it back if I do not like it or if it does not work or has some drawbacks that I could not foresee when looking at the information on Amazon's product page. It it awful if I spent money (even if its only 99 cents) for software which does not work (for me or in general) after playing with it for five minutes.
   It would be dead easy for Apple to add a trial period for each software that is not free. If the author/publisher of an app wants it, you could choose "try it" instead of purchasing it and after a number of days (the duration could be probably defined by the author of the app, but 14 days would almost always work for me) the app asks you to confirm that you actually want to buy it, oherwise you would not be able to start it.
2. Sub Categories
   Browsing a category in the App Store is pointless for categories like "Games" where you will find more than thousand unsorted entries. Did anyone at Apple ever try to browse through this with the 25-entries a page mechanism they put into the AppStore app? A second level (e.g. "Action", "Strategy", ...) would at least ease the pain. Should not be a big deal either to implement that, no?
3. Update more than one app at a time
   Where is that "Update all" functionality I have seen on the pre-2.x firmware versions? Or even better: Allow me to select which of the available updates I want to install and then install them all without requiring me to enter the Appstore, select the update, tap on "Free" and then on "Install" - for every single of the 6 available updates that are shown in the "Updates" section.

Well, the AppStore is a great way to add stuff to your iPhone and it works nicely for most cases, but I really think that there is room for optimization :) ..

The ultimative iPhone eMail application: iMail Professional

iMail Professional - the ultimative mail application for my iPhone 3G!

Almost everybody owning one of these crazy genius Apple smartphones will agree: This gadget simply rocks and its new user interface concept is simply the beginning of a new era. But why on earth did Apple, the uber master of usability and "it just works damnit!" put one of the most crappy and feature-less mobile mail clients on their device and (the most surprising fact) still does not seem to be able to provide us with a decent mail application that actually can be really used by people who have more than one mail account or get more than 5 mails per day?

Now, that is the point where iMail Professional enters the scene. Well, it actually does not because at this point I am just dreaming and trying to collect a list of features that the perfect mail app for my iPhone needs to have and if anybody is reading this, please let me know what *you* think is missing...

iMail Professional Feature List:

Landscape Mode
This includes being able to write new mails and browse folders in landscape mode. Browsing folders can be implemented as a two-pane layout, that means you see the tree structure of folders on the left side and the list of mails for the currently selected folder on the right side.

I do not get it. What does prevent the developers at Apple to implement a Landscape mode for their mail (and SMS while we are at it) app? Honestly, I develop software myself and I would expect that anyone with a little bit of coding experience can implement this feature in a week or so.

Extensive Mail Search Capabilities
Being able to search through all or selected mail accounts and folders by specifying one or more header fields (and the search keywords) and/or the text I am looking for in the message body is a must-have for a professional mail application.

I have thousands of mails stored in my several IMAP accounts. And I receive quite a bunch of new ones each day. It is nice that I can mail my flight schedule to myself in order to have it with me when I am travelling, but this is not very useful when you need the information and have to scroll through piles of new (and in this particular situation not very interesting) messages.

IMAP Folder Management
Being able to create new and move/rename/delete folders would be helpful to organize mails on the go. I really would like to see this and IMHO this belongs in every professional mobile mail  application.

Customizable Folder Views and Direct Folder Search
Thunderbird has it (and others too) and I desperately need this on my iPhone as well. Defining filters for mail folder views including the sort field and sort order would be great and a search field which allows me to quickly filter the mails in the currently selected filter would be fantastic.

Fast Folder and Account Navigation
Lets face it: Moving back and forth between different mail accounts on our iPhone is a big deal. And the fact that the full folder structure is shown when you browse folders is a big waste of screen space. The ultimative iPhone mail client has a way to easily navigate to a different folder on a different account, for example by providing a button that brings up a search field where I can perform a search for a folder name. Or, a simple drop down list of all accounts which brings you to the top folder of that account with two "clicks" instead of having to navigate all your way back to the account list.

The ultimative gold standard for folder navigation would be a tree-like folder view where I can expand or collapse sub folders of a folder and the platin edition of folder navigation would allow me to define a list of favourite folders which I could access via a "jump to:" screen that pops up when I double tap on the name of the currently shown folder.

Combined Inbox
Having more than one account means having to check every single account for new messages, which would result in a lot of jumping around even with the fast folder navigation features of iMail Professional. The Blackberry has a combined inbox view which simply lists the new mails of all account inboxes - being able to select the accounts that should participate in this would be great, of course.

Release Date
If we believe Apple, this mail app will never be released - it "provides the same or similar functionality" as the mail app does. Yeah, right. Did you already jail break your iPhone? if you did, you will agree that the applications you can install using Cydia instead of AppStore definitely make it clear that this mobile phone has the potential to become a fantastic smartphone. Being able to use MMS, VoIP, Video Recording and landscape SMS is fantastic. You are amazed about what this great device can do and at the same time you are totally puzzled why this functionality was not provided by Apple or is actually not allowed to enter the famous AppStore. Heck, I would buy iMail Professional as soon as it is available, and I would happily pay 30 Bucks for it or even more. That investment is easily returned by saving time and nerves when using a mobile email application that is worth its name.

NTP Pool - Giving away GPS time server equipment!

The NTP Pool project is giving away high quality GPS equipment for timekeeping to server operators. Run your own stratum-1 server!

read more | digg story