Tag Archives: application

[iOS] John Cage Piano App Released

For celebrating John Cage’s 100th birthday, the John Cage Trust just released an iOS and Android version of the CagePiano.

The John Cage Official Website says:

One of the many ingenious innovations of American composer/writer/artist John Cage was his creation of the “prepared piano”, in which he placed objects beneath and between the strings of a grand piano to create an entirely
new instrument.

The sounds of John Cage’s Prepared Piano are now available for you to play on your portable device with this innovative app. Play meticulously sampled sounds of a piano prepared with the actual materials used by John Cage in the preparations for his Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48) as sampled under the supervision of the John Cage Trust.

  • Both paid and free versions allow you to your record your performance and share it via Facebook, Twitter and email.
  • The paid tablet version features all 36 prepared notes, playable at once, plus the ability to save your performances locally, making dramatically unique ring tones possible.
  • The free version offers 9 sampled notes on screen at a time, while a random shuffle button makes available other prepared notes.

Prices and Availability

The iPhone version is free. The iPad version is US$0.99.
The Android version is free aswell. But the Android tablet version is also US$0.99

The free version features only 9 tones at once. The paid version has all 36 notes playable at once.

 

[Pre] Video Recording with Precorder 0.2 Alpha

The long waiting is over. A team around the Precentral’s forum member Prenosicator has released an alpha version of a Palm Pre video recording application. It requires WebOS 1.3.1.

You will not find it in the know homebrew repositories as long as it is in alpha status. Anyway for all of you able to root into your beloved Palm Pre the installation is as simple as drinking beer.

Kudos fly out to Prenosicator and his dev team guys. This is a very nice app, many of us have been waiting for.

Features

Option Description Selections
Audio Format Select what format you would like the audio stream to be saved in. AAC, AMRNB, MP3
Video Format Select what format you would like the video stream to be saved in. Mpeg-4, H.263, H.264/AVC
Container Select what multimedia container the audio/video streams will be in. mp4, 3gp
Media Source Would would you like Precorder to capture. Audio only, Video only, Both
Flash Would you like to use the built in LED for illumination Off, On
  • Options in bold are defaults
  • Recordings land in /media/internal

Installation

  1. root into your Pre (weather via Novaterm or running the terminal installed from within Preware)
  2. go to Pre’s tmp folder
    root@palm-webos-device:/# cd /tmp
  3. download the alpha version of Precorder
    root@palm-webos-device:/# wget http://bit.ly/precorder-bootstrap
  4. install Precorder
    root@palm-webos-device:/# sh precorder-bootstrap

Links

» PreCentral Forums: Introducing Precorder, in Alpha testing form
» WebOS-Internals: Precorder – Version: Alpha 0.2.0

Screenshots

Courtesy of WebOS-Internals.org

[iPhone] Makayama releases Voice Dial App

As of yesterday Makayama released a Voice Dial Application for the iPhone. That means we finally can dial numbers without looking at the screen. Driving in your car and making phone calls is much safer now.

Voice Dial does not depend on a dictionary or vocabulary. Instead you can record voice samples for any contact in the addressbook. It therefore works with all languages.

There are two versions of Voice Dial:

  1. For iPhone firmware version 2.0 (updated iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G): Simply download from AppStore using iTunes.
  2. For iPhone firmware version <= 1.1.4. Your iPhone needs a ‘jailbreak’ to install. Start Installer, press Sources, then Edit , then Add . Next, type http://tinyurl.com/3544mp

The introduction offer until August: is $ 24.95 (EUR 17.95) ex. tax

Voice Dial is definitly the missing application for the iPhone. Find the manual here or watch the video:

absatz

[iPhone] Apple’s AppStore DRM broken

You don’t trust DRM protections? You read that Microsoft and Yahoo switched off their DRM servers thus disallowing the continuous use of legally bought Music?

Then this might be the news for you. Sources that wish to stay anonymous confirmed and explained that removing of AppStore’s DRM of your legally bought applications is fairly simple for people who know what a command line is.

The technique only requires a jailbroken iPhone that got SSH installed. Once you legally bought the application you can run it on your iPhone / iPod Touch. Then you log in via SSH, determine the process ID and dump a part of the memory. Since the application needs to be decrypted in order to run on your iPhone it will be decrypted before it’s going to be executed. So in memory you have the decoded binary and you only need to dump in to a file. Using the GNU debugger here makes your life easy. After that you only need to replace the part of the encrypted binary with the memory dump and set a flag to not encrypted. People who know what ProcDump in the early Windows days did: this is exactly the same technique without the automatization.

Anyway we’re not sure if more concrete information may violate Germany’s weird intellectual property rights, we can’t go into further details here. We recommend to do a Google search. You will most likely find one or two tutorials that go in to detail step by step. Applying that technique will allow you to save your very bought apps. We don’t condone misuse or piracy.

[iPhone] Experienced Issues with Firmware 2.0

After some days of using a pwned iPhone 2G with firmware 2.0, we found some issues. As of now, we don’t know where they come from. But we definitly know: we don’t like them.

  • WiFi doesn’t stay connected, it falls “asleep” and takes time to reconnect
  • the more apps have been used, the longer it takes to see reactions
    means: if you click on contacts and have used Safari, SMS and Youtube before, opening of contacts takes a lot longer than after an fresh reboot!
  • loading the contacts take 5-10 seconds
  • scrolling through contacts is jerky and freezes the view from time to time
  • scrolling through photos is jerky and freezes the view from time to time
  • launching the camera takes up to 10 seconds
  • the unlock slider may not react in time and you may miss a call
  • keyboard reacts slower than on 1.1.4
  • reaction time is heavily delayed (or seems not to react at all for more than 17 seconds – see video below)

We won’t blame anyone for this, because on the one hand this could be an effect of Pwning the iPhone and on the other hand these issues might be “features” of the original unmodified firmware 2.0 aswell. See update below, this is a firmware 2.0 issue.

Anyway we feel there are heavy problems with the memory management in firmware 2.0, that need to be addressed soon. Workflow was a lot faster with firmware 1.1.4.

As of now we just reboot the iPhone once a day, but this really is no working solution for such a device. We feel this reminiscent to Windows 95 times is not necessary.

Update: it has been reported this may come from Cydia. As we’re investigating this issue, we get back to you once we found a solution.

Update: Pumpkin of the iPhone Dev Team reports this most likely is an issue of the original firmware 2.0. Native iPhone users have also experienced this behaviour (see reports here in Apple’s forums). The internet is full of reports. Do a Google search you will find plenty of people reporting these issues.