noobatlife

I’ve just finished playing around with a new iPhone app called JaaduRDP – which as the name suggests is an RDP client for the iPhone. Before using it I was pretty skeptical about how effective the iPhone would actually be as an input device for a machine running windows but I’m happy to report that it works quite well.It’s fully featured, and supports the iPhone’s inbuilt VPN client as a method of connection which is great news for anyone looking to manage your company’s servers remotely.

Controls are mostly as expected – pinch zoom, tap to click, etc. Keyboard input is manual (as in when you click a text editable field, the keyboard doesn’t automaticcaly pop up) which is a good thing considering the small screen.

I ran through a few quick mock senarios, restarting services, checking event logs etc and they were all quick. In fact the connection speed is downright impressive, over 3G or WiFi.

You can check out the rest of the features here, or buy it now on iTunes.

Last week it emerged that Facebook is on the verge of launching a new publishing feature dubbed the ‘Everyone’ button. In case you missed the coverage, its basically a way to publish your status updates/links/pictures/etc to publicly despite an otherwise private profile. Great for when you want everyone to know whats happening in Iran (how topical of me), but don’t nessisarly want them to know where you’re meeting friends for dinner.

This is a fantastically cunning move by Facebook, and one that I think is going to really going to make things hard for Digg & Twitter. Once you give the 200 million odd facebook users the ability to contribute to the ‘public stream’ in a way that allows privacy when they require you open a whole new world of possibilties.

It doesn’t take a genius (hence my post) to figure out where they’re going with this:

Digg Killer – Add a ‘Dislike’ button to go with ‘Like’, rank popular popular posts and you have Digg.com for the mainstream. Digg would really need to come up with something special to fend off this fight, as their concept is pretty simple at its heart.

Twitter Killer – Allow users to ‘follow’ users public feed without being a friend, and make the stream searchable for extra points.

People often scoff at the $10 Billion valuable given to Facebook, but given the sheer power the network has to destory other startups I don’t think its far off the mark. So long as they contiune to deliver strong products, comparable to any compitition they’re always going to win.

So good luck Digg, Twitter – you’re going to need it.

So the much anticipated iPhone 3.0 OS update was released last week, bringing with it a swag of much needed updates included search, mms, tethering, push notifications and more.

If you’re anything like me the first thing you want to do with your freshly updated iPhone is to jailbreak it, and unleash the full power of the device.

So here it is, step by step exactly how to jailbreak your iphone as I know it can be quite overwhelming for new users.

1. Sync your iPhone with iTunes, update to 3.0 and do a full backup
2. Download redsn0w-win_0.7.1.zip from the iphone-dev blog here
3. Unzip, and run redsn0w.exe
4. redsn0w will ask for the .ipsw (firmware) file for your iPhone. It should be in the following folder – C:\documents and settings\<username>\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\Device Support – or similar. If you’re having trouble fnding the .ipsw file, use windows search to find it or you can download it manually from here.
5. After loading the firmware into redns0w, you’ll received a message “IPSW Successfully Identified”, click next.
6. Make sure “Install Cydia” is ticked (it is by default), click next.
   
7. Turn your iPhone off and plug it into your computer, click next
8. Follow the onscreen instructions to put your iPhone into DFU mode and begin the jailbreak proccess. This will take about 10 minutes during which time your iPhone screen will flash bright white, and display the jailbreak logos.
9. Once the proccess is complete you will get a message saying “Done”. Click finish to reboot your iPhone for the last time.
10. Thats it! You’ve successfully jailbroken your iPhone 3.0 using redsn0w. You should see a Cydia icon on your springboard.

So whats the point of all this? Why do we want to jailbreak our phone anyway?

Well now we can run unsigned software, without going through the appstore. There are tons of useful apps avaliable only through Cydia.

If you’re morally loose you may even be intersted in running ‘cracked’ or ‘pirated’ apps on your iPhone. I might cover this in another post soon!

Either way, enjoy – and thank you iPhone dev team