Monday January 28, 2008

- iSync Plug-In Maker in Action - Eric - 22:35:00

Our German friend from open.source.mac have published an interesting news about iSync plugins, and especially those supposed to be released for some popular Sony Ericsson models. As the company failed to deliver them on time, they decided to use the iSync Plug-In Maker, an application available from Apple Developer Tools, to create a Sony Ericsson K800i plugin, 100% compatible with the one provided by Apple, and demonstrating the power of this tools.
If you own a SE mobile phone not supported in iSync yet, then you should definitely have a look at this story as it also includes links to "home-made" plug-ins and a lot of information (such as HOWTO: Write iSync Phone Plugins)

- Samsung and Hynix Team Up - Lionel - 18:59:24

Source: CDR Info

Proving that times are particularly hard for memory manufacturers, Samsung and Hynix, the two largest manufacturers of flash memory, have decided to work more closely to co-develop the next generation of memory. It is no less than a 9.6 billion dollar investment to be made, jointly, by the firms' R & D departments.

They hope to make significant breakthroughs that will allow them to offer new products and also to force their competitors to pay royalties in order to utilize the technology in their own flash modules.

It must be said that if this is accomplished with drastic price reductions, the future looks more than promising, especially with the advent of solid state disk drives (SSD), which should open up huge opportunities at the expense of platter-based disks. But to succeed, they must produce memory chips that will combine capacity and performance, things difficult to reconcile today.

[translation by CliveAtFive]

- Repairing an iBook's retro internal circuits - Lionel - 18:29:27

In the era of MacBooks, MacBook Pro's and MacBook Air's, an iBook looks like a dinosaur. However, if it still works, that machine will still be usefull for some purposes.
Reboutte, a member of our fora, dediced to repair a broken iBook - apparently a wire had come loose, and made a short circuit.

He managed to fix the problem, and posted photos (with explanation) of the process online:
http://boutte.free.fr/ (French)

[translation by xavier]

- Compatible SSDs for MacBook Air - Lionel - 16:37:57

Several readers asked us about compatible SSDs to be installed in MacBook Air.
You will need 1.8" PATA SSDs, with a 5mm thickness and featuring a ZIF socket. As there are different sizes of ZIF, you will need the smallest version.
To our knowledge, only SSDs from Samsung or Supertalent are compatible with the MacBook Air, with storage capacity toping at 64GB.


[translation by Linathael]

- Coming soon: affordable OLED keyboards - Lionel - 09:48:21

Source : http://www.xbitlabs.com

Everyone has heard about Art Lebedev's OLED keyboards, fewer have ever seen one and far fewer would even be able to afford one. Lebedev's keyboard (the Optimus) has the distinctive feature of OLED keys which are fully configurable.
Difficulties getting their product out the door in volume at a reasonable price leaves room for others to get started.
This will soon be the case -- Foxconn, which has joined with United Keys to propose an OLED keyboard (it is not known how many keys). Foxconn is a monster manufacturer, making millions of products for itself and other companies, including Apple. If Foxconn moves into the area, it will flood the market.
One can easily imagine that the next step for Apple after the multitouch trackpad will be to transform it into a secondary configurable context-sensitive display.

[translation by jeremy]

- Refurbed iMac 17'' at 699€ - Lionel - 09:28:52

Apple is offering a White refurbed iMac 17 "1.83 GHz C2D at a very low price, 699€. Be warned, however, at this price you will have the education model -- it lacks a dedicated video card, using (on board) GMA 950 integrated graphics. Everything else is the lowest option: a 160 GB drive, a Combo drive and only 512 MB of RAM.
It will, therefore, interest those for whom price is most important.

to the Refurb Store


[translation by jeremy]

- A new Jailbreak for the iPhone 1.1.3 available - Lionel - 08:43:29

Most certainly this is a hot subject for the do-it-yourself iPhone addicts. People are willing to risk all to gain in notoriety.
A few days after announcing a first method to jailbreak the iPhone, one second is proposed by the dev team iPhone. It has a principal advantage of not using any potentially illegal means to arrive at this result. This new version preserves Baseband (firmware modem) intact, which makes it possible to have an unlocked iPhone that can use Turbosim. However, this causes problems with the system of localization.
If you go to the forums of Frenchiphone you will find that there are still many problems with this method as well as problems of installation. We advise you to wait until these issues have been clarified before installing it yourself

[translation by crispin]

- Jailbreak for the iPod Touch 1.1.3 available - Lionel - 07:41:29

The site iJailbreak proposes software that permits running Jailbreak on the iPod Touch with firmware 1.1.3
It is necessary to start with an iPod Touch running firmware 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 and that already has Jailbreak installed. Apple will appreciate the fact that this activates software that normally one should pay Apple $20 for. It appears that these applications are already installed by default with firmware 1.1.3. Paying the $20 does nothing more than activate them and make them available.

[translation by crispin]