Ideas for Ways to Improve the iPhone
Ever want to access the Internet while driving without risking your life? I have been working all week on an application that does that. I’m still working on cleaning it up but look to see the key component, a port of espeak (voice synthesis) released to an installer.app repository early next week (probably a personal one).
Practically anyone who has hacked their iPhone is going to lose their keychain and photos when performing an upgrade. It seems quite straight forward to create an application to back this information up as well.
The keychain information seems to be stored in /var/root/Library/Keychains, the photos would seem to be stored in /var/root/Media/Photos. A simple application could take that information and back it up somewhere. After upgrading (and reinstalling the application probably using Installer.app) the same application could restore it for you.
Anyone up to the task? I plan to just back things up manually using ssh for now…
Following up on the random ringtone idea from last week, I came up with another idea that could be useful if you’re out there setting up your custom ringtones — the silent ringtone.
When I first got my cell phone number I was getting calls for the previous owner for months. It’d be nice to give those callers (who I affectionately named “Block Me”) a silent ringtone so I could just ignore them outright. Another case I use more often is calls from the local gaming store. It’s just much easier for them (and me) to leave me a message about the item I ordered coming in.
I hope all of you are having as much fun with customizing your ringtones as I am!
Everyone’s heard about Sudoku by now — it’s that Japanese game based on a 3×3 grid of 3×3 boxes that vaguely resembles a magic square. Shinro appears to be a game in its infancy that might be the next craze. I first saw Shinro when riding Southwest Airlines through their Spirit magazine:
http://www.spiritmag.com/fun/pdf/shinro.pdf
If you’re like me, you like a little variety in your life. Sure ringtones are supposed to be the same so you can tell who’s calling, but I like the surprise to hear what new tune pops out (and I have a lot of great ringtones).
So this idea is random ringtones. And this time I even have a suggestion on how I’d implement it — named pipes. Remember those old programs that generate random signatures in UNIX? Well on the iPhone we should be able to do the same thing:
http://www.deez.info/sengelha/code/sigrandd/doc/
One more idea for random ringtones — groups. If you use all the ringtones I’m sure you’ll get a built-in one you don’t like. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if you could use a random ominous ringtone for anyone from work?
Have fun with this one — I’m looking forward to seeing it soon!
Updated: The users on #iphone-dev came up with an alternative way of implementing this which might be easier to implement (and safer than pipes) — just use a crontab to change the file every so often. Sure it doesn’t guarantee you get a new ringtone every call if the calls come in within the same minute but it certainly comes close!
For a web application, it’s quite well implemented. It’s major lack of feature is persistence (which of course is no fault of Arcadiusz) — if something happens and Safari has to reload the page you’ve just lost the game you were playing. I would love to see pencilmarks, Red/Blue coloring, hints, and all the features that Andrew put into his version, but realistically that’s tough to do in an application that has to be downloaded each time you want to play it.
The only problem I had with Sudoku was one time I ended up with an unsolvable puzzle. I checked it against a solver and verified that it was indeed unsolvable. Obviously if I’m going to be spending time doing a puzzle I’d like it to be solvable.
A simple application that allowed you to schedule shows and movies on your TiVo. Extra points if the application allows you to see what’s showing and to delete shows you don’t need (say if you’re on vacation).
You can already do this via a Safari bookmark to the TiVo website, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice simple application for doing this instead?
This blog is about ways to improve the iPhone. I’ll talk about application ideas, features, bugs, and much more!
