metro UK - digital newspaper

everyone in the UK’s freebie newspaper; metro news is a daily newspaper given away on public transport and street corners in big cities in the UK [manchester and london for sure. i presume they give it away elsewhere too!]. while not the most in-depth paper out there - it’s no times, guardian or indy, it does at least try and be semi-intelligent and avoid the moronic drivel that the tabloids pump out. so quite handy to pass a bus or train journey.

anyway, they’ve just released this digital version. so now i can browse the latest news headlines while in the ‘gentlemen’s reading room’ of a morning :grin:

to be honest, the app is pretty crappy; images are horribly lo-res and navigating about the paper is a real PITA. in theory you tap to zoom in and then double-tap to zoom out again, but the interface also [when it feels like it] responds to pinching, so i’m forever accidentally zooming in instead of moving a page, or zooming out when i meant to zoom in, coz i tapped twice in succession too quickly or accidentally touched the screen with two fingers too close together. [OK. you may say ‘well that’s user error!’ but the point is, i dinnae have these problems with other ‘reader’ apps, so i just reckon this reader isnae very well designed].

one other annoyance. if you tap to zoom in a couple of times [to read a small article for example] and then want to zoom back out one level so you can move the page to the next bit you want to see, you cannae; a double-tap zooms you right back out again and you have to then zoom back in to the zoom-level prior to the one you were at before. it’s all horribly clunky.

then there is the complete lack of interactivity. basically what you’re getting is a lo-res PDF of the paper wrapped in a pretty shitty reader. so there are no links where there should be [for example clicking on ‘continued on page 8’ willnae do anything] and nothing on the puzzles page can actually be played on-screen.

on the upside, the app does allow you to download the paper for offline reading [havenae tried that yet, as i’m always near a wifi network] and it also has a browsable archive of previous editions.

all in all, i s’pose it’s OK for a freebie. but i think the metro news would have been better off just distributing the paper as a downloadable PDF which could be read on one of the decent readers out there [my own fave being goodreader]. sometimes having your very own app is more a massage to the ego, than the best option for your users.

COST: FREE
RATING:

one last one for today:

SBSettings [cannae find specific app page. here is the dev’s site]

this app adds a quick configurable access panel [you launch it by swiping across the main menubar, while on the springboard screen], which allows you to quickly toggle on and off various features on your ipod/iphone. for example - location services, wifi… etc.

it’s quite a nice time-saver, as it saves you having open up the preferences app each time. i’d imagine it would be handy for trying to squeeze out the most battery life possible, as you can quickly switch off all unecessary services and then - just as quickly - switch them on again, as and when you need them:

clicking on ‘processes’ brings up an OSX style process viewer, which lets you quit running processes to free up memory. it’s interesting to note that shutting down apps on the ipod/iphone disnae necessarily free up all the associated processes. for example, the ‘music’ process seems to run continually [and you cannot kill it] and also [as in my screengrab here] activities such as watching a video on a website, or viewing a video on youtube can leave the ‘video’ process running, even if you have quit the youtube and safari apps. so i think this is quite a handy wee feature.

the process manager also has a ‘free up memory’ button which [i’m presuming] hoovers up memory still being used by apps which are no longer running as - even if you dinnae kill any processes before hitting it - it usually manages to free up some RAM [from somewhere ???]. note the jump in my free RAM, from 131MB to 155MB, between the previous and following screengrabs. [actually, it was 156MB, but taking the screengrab caused it to drop to 155MB].

if you’re wondering about the free RAM readout in my main menubar, that’s one of the options accessible from SBSettings’ preferences, which you access by clicking on the small ‘more’ icon:

amongst other things, there are preference screens which allow you to configure which icons appear in the SBSettings panel and hide the icons of iphoneOS built-in apps which, as you know, cannot be deleted from the ipod/iphone. yay! - at last i can get rid of the pointless stocks and voice memos apps! :thumbsup:

SBSettings comes with three or four built-in themes, all of which achieve the same level of fugliness. shame really, as it’s a handy app that i use all the time to toggle off services i’m not using; one drawback of having your free RAM permanently visible in the main menubar is that you start to become a bit OCD about keeping an eye on it :doh:

this [fugliness] and the added fact that the app features the dreaded adverts - although to be fair to the dev, they are very tiny and only appear at the bottom of the prefs screen - means i’m going to have to be extra harsh and knock off a star.

TYPE: jailbroken only
COST: FREE
RATING:

since one of the reasons i jailbroke my ipod was so i could enjoy its full ‘mini mac’-ness, one of the first apps i installed via cydia was mobileterminal which, as the name suggests, gives you a terminal on your ipod/iphone, so you can have a poke around in the OSX/*nix style internals. here i am changing the default root password to something more secure [it is ‘alpine’ by default on all ipods/iphones]:

the mobileterminal interface makes pretty good use of the iphoneOS, although it’s always going to be a bit cramped. as well as the keyboard to type commands in, there is also a configurable quick command panel which pops up if you tap and hold in the centre of the screen. some of the quick commands also have sub-panels which open, when you click the appropriate button on the main panel:

preferences are available under ‘misc’ then ‘config’ in the quick command panel:

amongst other things, you can customise the commands which appear on the quick command panel and also ‘gestures’ - commands which are triggered by swiping across the screen. this second feature is a really nice use of the iphoneOS. for example, [by default] sweeping upwards will re-enter the previous command. the equivalent of hitting the ‘up arrow’ on your keyboard with the traditional OSX terminal.

TYPE: jailbroken only
COST: free
RATING:

stage 03:

now that you’ve installed your package manager, it will also appear as an app on your ipod. here’s cydia, nestling in amongst the other folks in my ‘apps which help you get new toys’ section:

fire up cydia and you’re good to go to start properly invalidating your warranty :devil:

again, my memory is hazy and it’s not helped by the fact that almost simultaneously with jailbreaking my ipod, i was jailbreaking the GF’s new palm pre. but i seem to remember that, when you first fire up cydia, it asks to install some low-level *nix tools, such as GCC etc. to enable it to install the other stuff later.

anyway, here is the cydia home screen. as you can see there are the normal app store styleee tabs along the bottom to let you browse by category or search for apps, as well as a section which notifies you of updates to any jailbreak apps you have installed. apart from the fact that cydia [and the others] have an extremely irritating habit of suddenly throwing an advert into any square cm of whitespace left, whilst you’re reading a screen of info - the apps work quite well, albeit that there’s a bit of an annoying lag every time you first fire up cydia, while it redownloads the latest package info. i guess these guys just cannae afford servers with the same bandwidth as apple can.

once cydia has downloaded its latest data, you’re ready to go browsing and installing:

the green ticks represent packages i have installed. most of the system level stuff is installed by other apps or utilities, or by cydia itself. a bit like OSX really. i’[m not such a geek i’ve been choosing to manually install all these obscure sub-system whatchamacallits.

one weird thing about apps installed via jailbreak [although perhaps not unexpected], is that - like the built-in apps on the ipod/iphone, it’s not possible to delete them via an ‘X’ in the corner of their app icon.

instead, you use the ‘manage’ tab in cydia to view and/or uninstall cydia-installed apps:

i’m gonna knock a star off for the overabundance of advertising in the interface - just coz i find ads really irritating. but overall, it’s a nice easy way of geting new apps for your jailbroken ipod/iphone

TYPE: jailbroken only
COST: free
RATING:

OK. on to stage two of the ‘great jailbreaking’ adventure:

after jailbreaking your ipod, you’ll find that there is now an app installed on it called blackra1n:

your next task is to install one of the package installers. there’s a choice of cydia or rock. i think there’s also another one called icy, which you can add, but seeing as they’re all much of a muchness and all seem to access most of the same repositories, it all amounts to the same thing really:

i initially chose rock and then, when i got disgusted with its ad-infested interface, switched to cydia. unfortunately cydia is similarly repulsive to look at, so [as i said above] it disnae really matter which one you choose.

at this late stage ‘after the event’, i cannae remember whether those two package managers were already listed in blackra1n, or whether i had to add their URLs manually. i suspect the later, since icy is not there and that’s the one i didnae try.

the blackra1n ipod/iphone app disnae do much apart from install the package managers, but no reason to give it less than five just for being a one-trick pony.

TYPE: jailbroken only
COST: free
RATING:

well, it’s been a while since i last updated this thread. mainly because; A - i’ve not bought any new apps recently and B - the new ‘stuff’ i have installed on my ‘pod has been as a consequence of jailbreaking it a week or two ago.

so, just to keep the thread alive, i thought i’d throw in a couple of jailbreak-only apps this weekend:

first up blackra1n

there are a couple of ways to jailbreak your ipod/iphone. i opted for blackra1n as consensus seemed to agree it was the most straightforward and also, those in the know, made a point of saying that it was compatible with the latest iphoneOS 3,1,2.

jailbreaking itself was a piece of piss. plugin the ipod to your mac, run blackra1n and the following minimalist dialogue appears:

click the button and blackra1n puts your ipod into recovery mode and does it’s thing [it only takes a minute or two]:

this is the most frightening part of the operation as, while the jailbreak is in progress, your ipod’s screen changes to show the image above of that strange geek-boy with a load of iphones orbiting him. i thought at first it was that boogly-eyed cunt off lord of the rings, but i’m not sure now. anyway, he’s not a pleasant sight, when he replaces your ipod’s screen for a few mins!

after the jailbreak is completed, the following dialogue appears and the ipod reboots:

i must point out, at this stage that my ipod seemed to hang after jailbreaking. but i just ran the blackra1n installer again and it booted up fine the next time.

i also had a few times after that, when i thought i’d fecked the thing because i installed a couple of system level apps which required a reboot and, each time i did so, the ipod went into recovery mode and i had to plug it into my macbook and run blackra1n again.

i’ve since realised that this was ‘user error’. it’s not very prominenlty mentioned anywhere but jailbreak+iphoneOS 3,1,2 is currently what they call a ‘tethered jailbreak’, which basically means that, if you install something that requires you to restart your ipod, you have to plug it into your mac first, before restarting, otherwise it will boot into recovery mode.

since i found this out, i have had no probs whatsoever with my jailbroken ipod.

i really want to knock a star off for making me look at that creepy ‘orbiting iphone guy’, while my ‘pod was being jailbroken :grin: - but blackra1n makes the whole jailbreaking process so quick, painless and easy, that i cannae bring myself to be so churlish.

COST: free
RATING: