Spire Program Ports Siri to Jailbroken iOS Devices

A recently released Siri port called Spire promises to bring Apple's personal digital assistant to any jailbroken device running iOS 5. And unlike previous Siri ports, Spire is not burdened by copyright issues, according to its developer. But as is typical for hacks that put Siri on non-Apple approved devices, Spire is not a complete solution and there a few technological hurdles to overcome. Besides a jailbroken iOS device, you also need access to an iPhone 4S and a proxy server as a go-between for your jailbroken device and Apple's servers.

Spire comes from Grant Paul (no relation to the author) who recently worked with Steve Troughton-Smith to get Siri running on the iPhone 4 and helped created an iPad 2 jailbreak method in July.

A token iPhone 4S

The downside of porting Siri to devices other than the iPhone 4S is that they require an authentication token from Apple's latest smartphone, currently the only Apple-approved Siri device. Most of Siri's voice-command processing happens via Apple's servers instead of on the actual device. To prevent unauthorized use, Apple requires each Siri-enabled device to have an authentication token before it can communicate with Apple.

Thus Spire will only work if you have access to an iPhone 4S to get your authentication token, and then you need all commands to go through that proxy server. That seems like a lot of technical overhead just to get a few voice commands on your phone, but right now it appears to be the only viable solution.

Other hacks, including the H1Siri hack that came out in early December also require a proxy server. The advantage with Spire, however, is that you can configure your own proxy instead of using a third party. Using your own server is a much safer way to handle a Siri hack since it avoids having your personal data flow through a server that you may not be able to trust.

Another advantage Spire has is that it appears to be a "legal" Siri hack, or at least a piracy-free one. “Spire uses a new method to obtain the files necessary for Siri, so it doesn’t have the copyright issues encountered by previous attempts,” Paul recently told 9-to-5 Mac. Earlier in December, Apple released an iPhone 4S update that allowed hackers to obtain iPhone system files without resorting to piracy. You can download Spire for free from the Cydia market for jailbroken iOS devices, but you'll want to be connected to a Wi-Fi network when you do it as the app download requires 100MB of data. You can also find a tutorial on how to install Spire on the blog Limera1n.

If you're thinking of jailbreaking your iOS 5 device, the iPhone Dev Team announced Tuesday morning that an untethered jailbreak for devices running iOS 5.0.1 (not including the iPhone 4S and iPad 2) was now available.

Source : Spire Program Ports Siri to Jailbroken iOS Devices

Google Helps You Follow Santa with Smartphones and Social Media

Technology is making it easy and fun to follow Santa this Christmas.

Android phones, Twitter, Google, and YouTube are among the tools you can use to keep tabs on the jolly old elf during his travels for Sunday's holiday.

Google Earth and Google Maps

The easiest way to see what Santa's up to is to visit NoradSanta.org where you can see an embedded map of Santa's journey. The North American Aerospace Defense Command says the man in red officially began his annual journey across the globe at 2 a.m. EST time Saturday morning. If you'd rather see Santa in all his glory on Google Earth, click the "Track Santa On Google Earth" button in the bottom right corner of the map. This will prompt you to download the Google Earth Plug-in for your browser (Windows 2000 or higher and Mac OS X 10.5 or higher).

Smartphones

You can easily track Santa from any mobile device equipped with Google Maps, including Android smartphones and tablets, the iPhone, and the iPad. Open up Google Maps on your device and search for "Santa" to see the man in red's most recent location. If you don't have a Google Maps app on your device, point your web browser to m.google.com/maps. Android and iPhone users can also download NORAD's free official Santa tracking app from the App Store or Android Market. Both stores have many Santa-tracking apps, so make sure you get the official version called NORAD Tracks Santa by Visionbox. The app updates with Santa's current location and you can also play a game called Elf Toss where you try to help the elves load Santa's sleigh in time for Christmas Eve.

Social Media

One of the fastest ways to keep tabs on Santa is through NORAD's official Track Santa Twitter feed providing constant updates of Santa's location and links to the latest videos recording his journey. You can also find NORAD tracking Santa on Facebook, Google+, and Santa's latest videos for 2011 on NoradSanta.org or NORAD Tracks Santa page on YouTube. Just like last year, you can also visit SendACallFromSanta.com to send a personalized holiday greeting from Santa to any phone number in North America. And you can have the kids call Santa's Google Voice number at 1-855-34-SANTA (72682) to leave a voicemail for the man in red. Santa's sleigh, dubbed Santa One, was recently cleared to fly over American skies at an altitude of 50,000 feet.

Tracking Santa Through the Years

The annual tradition of using military technology to track Santa was born in the 1950s.

A newspaper ad that was intended to publish a special telephone number for calling Santa on Christmas Eve instead printed the direct number for the commander-in-chief of Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), the predecessor to NORAD. As calls started pouring in to CONAD that night, Director of Operations Colonel Harry Shloup did not disappoint the young callers and had his staff check the radar for signs of Kris Kringle's sleigh.

Source : Google Helps You Follow Santa with Smartphones and Social Media

OpenPlug Studio now available for free

There is a good news for RIA / mobile developers, OpenPlug Studio is now available for free for all. OpenPlug Studio allows Flex developers to reuse their development skill, and existing code in developing applications for the mobile using ActionScript3, MXML, and web development languages such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc, and offers an alternative to the Flash Builder IDE.

Earlier a free version of the application has been available, but added advertisements into the application. Now instead the development tool itself is available for free, and instead "PRO" and "PREMIUM" support tiers are available for those that need it.

While this will also be possible with the latest Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex SDK 4.5, Flash Builder and OpenPlug have different ways of running the code on the target device.

While Adobe's answer to creating applications that run across platforms is to bring their Flash and AIR runtimes to each platform they plan to support, OpenPlug goes another way. OpenPlug takes the code you write in ActionScript3 and MXML and compiles it for the platform you want to run your code on, producing a native application for each platform.

OpenPlug extends the APIs available in Flex adding support for more mobile APIs with each new release. With OpenPlug native applications can be developed for the following platforms, iOS, Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian. Since it uses a modified Flex SDK, it is possible for developers to use some of their existing Flex application code (the core bits, not the UI), as a base for developing a mobile version. OpenPlug applications can also be extended using native code components. So one can write native code in C, Objective-C, or Java that can gain better access to the systems, allowing existing code to be reused without losing the unique advantage each platform allows.

OpenPlug itself is an Eclipse-based IDE that runs on Windows and Mac OSX, like the Flash Builder IDE, and can in fact even be installed as a plug-in to Flash Builder rather than a standalone application.

OpenPlug has a number of advantages over Flash Builder for those wanting to create mobile applications using Flex code, such as being free, supporting native UI components, native extensions and not requiring any additional runtimes.

You can find out more about OpenPlug on their site, and can download a copy after registering for a free account on their site.

Source : OpenPlug Studio now available for free

fring Announces Group Video Chat for Android and iPhone

Mobile communication service provider, fring announced today, the world’s first mobile group video calls for iPhone & Android devices. The app once installed on your device allows for up to four friends to engage in voice and video calls via Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G. fring uses proprietary DVQ technology, that delivers the highest quality video for all four participants.

According to Avi Shechter, Co-Founder & CEO of fring, ‘fring leap-frogs sluggish, expensive PC Group Video Calling solutions by giving users the world’s 1st mobile Group Video service, free. There is no reason why users need to run home to their PC in order to have a ‘spontaneous’ video call with their friends and family. Users love seeing all their friends at the same time, on one screen, but want to be able to do it, when and where they want. Just as fring was the 1st to liberate video calls from the PC back in 2009, we are the 1st to give users the ability to see all their friends on their phone at the same time, anywhere. This video call revolution lets fringsters be free to get together, wherever.

Source : fring Announces Group Video Chat for Android and iPhone

Apple iPhone 6 to get Sharp LCDs

Rumors of the iPhone 5 continue to rife and images of purported prototypes are already soaring on the web. Amidst that craziness, Japanese news daily Nikkei, reported that Apple will partner with Sharp to create next-generation low-temperature poly-silicon LCD displays for the iPhone 6. That means the iPhone 6 would have thinner and lighter display compared to the iPhone 4 and also offer more durability, higher aperture ratios and few connection pins.

Even in the past, Apple employed the Retina Display technology in the iPhone 4 providing crisper images, bright and improved contrast ratio. However, Apple seems to be trying out another option for the iPhone 6 scheduled to hit production floors in mid-2012.

For iPhone 6, Apple will use Sharp's LCD displays with Thin Film Transistors made from polycrystalline silicon (p-Si). These p-Si LCD displays are thinner, lighter and consume less power compared to the traditional LCD display screens. Apart from that, the p-Si LCD displays have high aperture ratio, more durability and less number of connection pins.  

Apple is expected to make use of these p-Si LCD displays as the technology allows putting optical sensors and other components on the glass substrate. So there's no need to add any additional layer of 'touch panel' to the device. In short, it will be part of more compact and slimmer iPhone device which we're currently referring as iPhone 6.

According to the images of iPhone parts circulating online, loads of assumptions can be made about the form factor, size and display technology to be used in the iPhone 6. However, nothing can be confirmed beforehand since Apple may just change the plans/designs for iPhoen 6. Take it with a pinch of salt.

  

Source : Apple iPhone 6 to get Sharp LCDs

TweetDeck 2.0 for iPhone released

Popular Twitter client TweetDeck has been redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to be faster and sleeker. And that’s not all. The older version has been temporarily removed from the iTunes App Store as version 2.0 is supposed to be much more than an upgrade, a replacement app. The older app will resurface once they've updated it to point existing users to the new version.

They call the new TweetDeck a Hollywood-esque “re-imagining” where the soul of the application remains the same but is brought up to speed. It still supports Facebook, MySpace and Twitter but the app’s interface has been revamped. Better graphics, addition of comon gestures for access control like blending timelines, DMs, Mentions, favorites, Facebook News feed into a personalized column, and being resolved for retina-displays are the upgrades worth mentioning. A version modified for iPad is also on its way.

There is much better multiple account handling in this new app. In the Home, Me and Inbox pre-defined columns you can choose exactly which accounts will be used.

The blending of accounts into a column is also very flexible. You can see DMs from one account, blended with your Facebook news feed, plus a couple of Twitter Lists, for instance.

Source : TweetDeck 2.0 for iPhone released - Completely reworked from scratch

Your iPhone is Tracking Your Locations

Two researchers, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan, have found that Apple iPhones store data on their users' locations which they store in a folder, both on their phone and on their computer when they sync with iTunes. Warden says that at first they didn't realize how much data was actually being stored, but when they discovered, it turned out to be a scary amount.

 

The data is stored in a file called "consolidation.db" and it contains longitude and latitude information along with timestamps. Apple has been recording this data since iOS 4.0 came out, it seems. The researchers believe that the data is collected from information from cell phone tower triangulations. It isn't very exact but it gives a good reference to where your cell phone has been over time. Warden and Allan have created an app that creates a visualization of the users' information on the iPhone 3G or the iPad.

They maintain right now that only the user has access to their location information. If someone else wants to access the information, they'd have to physically have the phone or computer with data backups. It seems to be a security feature you could use to track your phone but if someone already has your phone and they've run away, there's no information you can gather about where they've gone. So what is the point.

Source : Your iPhone is Tracking Your Locations

Google Music: iTunes Rival May Soon Launch

Reports are swirling around the Internet that Google is in the advanced stages of testing a music service that could one day rival Apple iTunes.

The latest reports the the company is internally testing the service, dubbed Google Music, come just weeks after a developer at the XDA Developers forum noted online that he stumbled upon Google Music when he fired up the Honeycomb version of Google's Android operating system on a smartphone.

Both reports come amid ongoing online murmurings that Google is working away on a social networking platform behind closed doors. For months now, online chatter has focused on whether Google is secretly trying to build its own social network, which would focus on gaming, music and/or movies. Potential names for the service include Google Me and Google Circle.

Analysts say Google Music is not likely to be the social platform that the industry has been anticipating. However, some do note that it could be a big piece of Google's social puzzle."I don't see this serving as Google's primary, stand-alone social networking service with which it will compete with Facebook et al," said Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis.

"That won't preclude Google from releasing a broader, general social networking platform. If anything, this music service will incorporate social networking facilities, perhaps tying into ... any potential Google offerings, such as the rumors surrounding a Google Me service," he added.

Hadley Reynolds, an analyst with IDC, agreed that Google Music won't be the company's social platform. "The music service category is well-defined on its own terms at this point," he said. Reynolds said it would be a good idea for Google to take on Apple and its popular iTunes service. While iTunes has had a significant head start, a similar service from Google for Android devices could chip away at Apple in a lucrative business.

"The iPod and iTunes, and later the iPhone and the iPad and iTunes, has given Apple close to a decade to define this mobile music experience in its own terms," said Reynolds. "The proliferation of Android devices is creating a customer base that will pull Google into competition with Apple in these areas."

Source : Google Music: iTunes Rival May Soon Launch