Here are some more tips for OSX – mostly for personal consumption but who knows, someone might find a use for them as well.

Also some iPhone hacking tips at the end. The discussion of the moral implications related to the subject will be saved for a latter post ;)

Data Detectors

Know how Mail.app would mess with your email when you have a number, or an email, or a date; it puts some kind of interactivity so you can have it add the text to your calendar, addressbook or whatnot? Well, apparently a lot of people (myself included) were irked by it as it sometimes can hinder simple text selection. Here’s how to kill it; fire up Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

For external iTunes library users

Here’s one I found out for myself, which may be useful for you people who, like me, have their music files stored in a separate volume.

As you know, I have my iTunes library (the music file) in the Time Capsule – so normally I’d just use the “Advanced” menu in iTunes’ preferences to point to the said music folder. The problem with that is that the index file¹ is still stored in the ~/Music/iTunes folder on the local machine.

I have two machines that access that same library, so I usually have to manually synch those index files (since they’re local) to avoid any conflicts or loss of data. The question that needed answering was this: How do I get these machines to access one single index file? The “Advanced” section can’t do it since it only allows you to point/set where your actual music files are.

The solution was simple: I moved all the contents of the ~/Music/iTunes folder to the Time Capsule. Then, I substituted a symlink² named “iTunes” in ~/Music on the local machine. That way, both machines “think” they’re accessing their local iTunes directories when in fact they’re accessing the Time Capsule… for both media and index files. So whenever I manipulate data from one computer, it’s already writing to the same index file that the other computer will access. Which means I don’t have to “synchronize” anything anymore.

The bonus of this approach was that if the Time Capsule was unavailable (hence the iTunes library), it would throw an error and prevent you from launching iTunes.

“Why would you want that?” – you may ask, I’ll tell you why. The problem with an external library and a local index file is that iTunes will always be able to run – in the event your external library is not there, it will not warn you unless you try accessing content which was stored on the unavailable volume. If you try putting new content (download a podcast, etc.) without the external drive available, it will still go ahead and do it… downloading it to your local iTunes folder… which means you’ll have your files spread out in different places without you knowing (until you actually check… which I did… and I was not happy).

So this approach may have the “drawback” of not being able to access iTunes at all unless the external drive was available, but I personally prefer it that way – because I hate it when I accidentally launch iTunes and it starts doing all this shit when I really didn’t even mean to launch it at all.

Installing cracked iPhone .IPA files.

iPhone/iPod Touch applications still use the .app extension, but “official” applications downloaded from the AppStore, when synched with iTunes, are encapsulated in an .ipa container file and stored locally on your machine. These files are legitimately registered to iTunes, so dragging them to iTunes will let you “add” the application and it will be included in the “list” of applications you can include/exclude with your devices.

Applications installed via Cydia are a bit different as the environment is self-contained; meaning everything that happens in your phone stays on your phone. If you reformat your phone, you’ll have to add whatever apps you installed through Cydia manually. With the .ipa method, you can just check the registered applications and they’ll be synced right back.

Now the problem here is that the application may be cracked or not, and since we’re talking .ipa files, the iPhone OS must have some way of authenticating the legitimacy of an application, which will have to be “dealt with” before we can have cracked .ipa's to work in the first place.

So first you need a jailbroken unit with openSSH installed. There’s also a file you’ll need, but I will not include it here for legal reasons; I’ll leave it to the readers’ resourcefulness to find out where to get it.

1. Using SSH, navigate to the folder: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileInstallation.framework³
2. Backup the file MobileInstallation file from the directory above
3. Copy the patched MobileInstallation file over to the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileInstallation.framework folder
4. Set permissions of that new file to 775
5. Navigate to /private/var/mobile/
6. Set permissions to the folder Applications to 777
7. Create a folder called Documents in the /private/var/mobile/Applications folder. Set permissions to 777
8. Navigate into the /Applications (from root) folder. Create a Documents folder there as well. Set permissions to 777
9. If connected, close iTunes and disconnect the phone from your Mac (or PC?)
10. Reboot your iPhone (this is imperative – otherwise Apps will not install!)
11. Copy cracked .ipa files into iTunes and sync.

Now all you need to do is find cracked .ipa files.