MxBlog

This has come to be a problem recently so I feel I should explain it. Francis, head of the DRP Dev team was the original developer to come up with the idea of an automatic Installer source refresh app. After getting carried away with other projects such as iLibertyX and other more important applications, I decided to make my own app that solved the Installer refresh issue. I had a great time being apart of that team, and wish the best for it. I would like to apologize for not giving credit to the francis and his team for this wonderful idea, it will definitely be there in the next update.

Max

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After getting a break between developing and school, I started to get back to my old habbit of downloading tons of applications from Installer. Now that there are so many repositories, I found my self becoming frustrated with Installer refreshing sources when I would go to open it. That is why I made InstaFresh. InstaFresh allows you to set the lastRefreshDate effectively disabling Installer’s automatic refresh for that day. Not only that, you can tell it to automatically refresh installer’s sources at a given interval. InstaFresh is available from BigBoss’s repository (http://iphone.sleepers.net/repo.xml) under the Utilities category.

Max

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I am about to start MxTube 2, I would like to know what new features you all want. Please post all feature requests in a comment of this post. Features I like, will be added to this post and will be included in MxTube2.

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Update 4/6/08: I am NOT able to put reverse sync into MxTube 2. Videos will still be played through MxTube, but an option to copy them to the iPod app will be available. Therefore, video reordering & renaming will be included features of MxTube 2.
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Update 4/5/08: I have updated the feature list below. Keep feature requests coming, it will only make MxTube2 better! Features that will most likely not make it into the cut are video reordering and audio only downloads. I cannot request audio only from youtube’s servers , and as for video reordering, if videos show in the iPod.app MxTube won’t have control over their order.

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New Features:
Search:

• Mobile YouTube (What the YouTube.app & MxTube 1.0 use) and YouTube.com Search. Videos from the YouTube.com search will be converted after download, Mobile YouTube will act like it did in MxTube 1.0.
• Video descriptions.
• “Play in YouTube app” button - Watch before you download.
• Video id lookup (youtube.com/?v=maxWVCW-Lqs).

Videos:

• Videos in the iPod.app.
• Reverse sync if possible.
• Video renaming.
• Video sharing (Email, and other options).
• Video reordering (In MxTube only).

Downloads:

• Pause & Resume Downloads.
• Download Videos from YouTube.app Bookmarks.

Max

PS: Support for other movie sites will not be possible. Also, all bugs will be fixed in MxTube2 including the premature download bug, there is no need to post about these in the comments section.

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I have been getting some emails about how to put images on the phone for ThemeBuilder to use. Here is a Windows and Mac tutorial for doing so.

EDIT: Here is a tutorial video by Blaqkie:

Mac:

1. First we need some way to access the phone. If you have not done so already, install BSDSubsystem from Installer under the System category. Then from the same category install OpenSSH.

2. Next download and install CyberDuck on your mac.

3. Get your iPhone’s IP Address by going to Settings>Wifi and tapping the blue circle-arrow to the left of your wifi network. Take note of the number next to IP Address.

4. Open CyberDuck and click on Open Connection. Change the protocol to SFTP and type in your iPhone’s IP Address in the Server box. The default username and password is u: root p: alpine or u: root p: dottie if on 1.0.x.

5. Click Connect, If a dialog box appears asking to accept the hosts key, click Allow. In the drop-down that says /private/var/root, select / at the bottom.

6. You should now see a list of items like Applications, bin, System, etc… click on var at the bottom. Then if you are on 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 click on mobile otherwise click on root.

7. Go to Library > ThemeBuilder (If you do not see the ThemeBuilder directory, try starting ThemeBuilder once. Also make sure you went to the correct home directory root/mobile). You should now see Dock, Icons, StatusBar and Wallpaper. These are the directories to put images in. You can now drag images from Finder into these directories, or make a folder inside of them to make an image category in themebuilder.

Windows:

1. First we need some way to access the phone. If you have not done so already, install BSDSubsystem from Installer under the System category. Then from the same category install OpenSSH.

2. Next download and install WinSCP on your computer.

3. Get your iPhone’s IP Address by going to Settings>Wifi and tapping the blue circle-arrow to the left of your wifi network. Take note of the number next to IP Address.

4. Open WinSCP and type in your iPhone’s IP Address in the Hostname box. The default username and password is u: root p: alpine or u: root p: dottie if on 1.0.x.

5. Click Login, If a dialog box appears asking to accept the hosts key, click Accept. Just above the file list is a blue bar that says something like /private/var/root, click on the folder that says .. right below the blue bar until the blue bar shows / only.

6. You should now see a list of items like Applications, bin, System, etc… click on var at the bottom. Then if you are on 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 click on mobile otherwise click on root.

7. Go to Library > ThemeBuilder (The ThemeBuilder directory is created upon first opening themebuilder). You should now see Dock, Icons, StatusBar and Wallpaper. These are the directories to put images in. You can now drag images from the left pane into these directories, or make a folder inside of them to make an image category in themebuilder.

Max

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Recently Gates from #iphone on irc.efnet.net proposed the idea of a native summerboard theme builder. After a day or so of conversing I decided to code ThemeBuilder (Also know as WinterBoard, ThemeBoard). It is now available from BigBoss’s installer repository (iphone.sleepers.net) which is also a Community Source. It supports editing current summerboard themes as well as creating new ones. To use your own images put them in /var/mobile/Library/ThemeBuilder (1.1.3 & 1.1.4) or /var/root/Library/ThemeBuilder (1.0.0 up to 1.1.2) in their respective directories.

Max

PS: If you would like to make an Image Pack for installer, follow this simple guide. ThemeBuilder supports four different image types: Wallpaper, Dock, StatusBar, and Icons. To make categories on the image selection list, make a subfolder with the category name. If there are no subfolder categories, ThemeBuilder will skip the category display list. If there are any categories ThemeBuilder will place all images not in a category into an Others category. For a sample, install TB Demo Image Pack from installer, and see how it places images.

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Today I became the proud owner of an iMac I am proud to announce MxTube developement will be back on track shortly. I plan to rebuild it from the ground up, not only will this make the app run much smoother, there will be very few bugs if any. Also, I have figured out why YouTube is closing the connection. Forgetting that the YouTube app was set up for steaming videos I figured it would wait until the entire download finished, but it sends the videos in a set of “packages” you could say. I will be building a system for next release of MxTube that will handle this, removing this bug once and for all. I am currently in the middle of a new project that will release soon called ThemeBuilder. This application creates summerboard themes and will have a gallery in a future release that will allow users to submit, rate and download themes. I would like to thank everyone that supported this project. All of the donations and positive comments have been a huge help.

Max

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I currently build all of my applications on my only computer, which at the moment runs Windows XP. Until recently it had been running great, but in the past week I have been getting the dreaded blue screen of death. It is still slightly usable, but running iTunes and Notepad++ at the same time causes the BSOD. This problem causes me to lose a lot of work everytime it happens. I’m working on summing up enough money to get a replacement, but until then I am not able to work on MxTube.

Max

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In this post I plan to answer most of the commonly asked questions I have been receiving recently.

1. At the moment, there is nothing I can do about downloads finishing prematurely. YouTube (Google) is closing the download connection on Wifi quality videos when on edge or another slow connection.
2. I will not be adapting this application for any other movie playing sites. The only reason this works with YouTube is because mp4 versions of their videos are available via an xml based search which the YouTube app uses.
3. Search results do not match those of YouTube.com exactly because not every youtube video has been converted to mp4. This is something I do not have control over.
4. I will most likely not build this app for use in the app store being released by apple, I doubt apple will approve it for obvious reasons.
5. Apps cannot just be placed into the iPod app. Not only do they have to be in the correct directory, but they need to be added to an SQLite3 db in the correct format. Also, upon syncing with iTunes, the database will be reset and the videos will disappear. If I can get videos to sync with iTunes you can expect this feature in a future version, but until then it doesn’t look like a possibility.
6. Audio only download is not an option. This would require downloading the full video, stripping the video (Not possible on iPhone) and building an audio player inside of MxTube for playback.
7. Negative comments and emails DO NOT help me make this app any better. If you have something negative to say about my application that is not constructive, don’t bother saying it at all.

Hope this clears up some confusion,

Max

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Glad to hear everyone liking MxTube so far, I am working on fixing many bugs as we speak. Just a note, this application will not work on 1.0.x, It requires a couple methods that came in version 1.1.1 I will be setting up a bug tracking system soon, but until then please do not email me or post comments with bugs that have been found.

Max

EDIT: MxTube 1.0b now supports 1.0.x firmware.

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My native version of MxTube is now available on installer under the Multimedia category. For those who haven’t seen it, I have a demo video I put up on MetaCafe to demonstrate its base features. I will be adding to this post more tomorrow with screenshots and features to come.

Max

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