Hijinks Inc.

Category: Installer.app

  • Bricked my iPhone

    I installed some early beta software on my iPhone a few days ago, and apparently something went terribly wrong because I couldn’t use Installer.app after that. No problem, I’ll just restore to 1.1.4 and use ZiPhone to jailbreak it, right? Wrong.

    After restoring the phone to 1.1.4 I ran ZiPhone, things went normally until it reached the “Installing base apps…” screen, where it decided to lockup. I killed the ZiPhone process and restarted the iPhone, it booted right back to the ZiPhone install screen again, and again, and again.

    Next I tried booting into DFU mode. If you’re unfamiliar with DFU mode, you enter it by pressing and holding the home and the power button simultaneously, once the phone turns off, continue to hold the home button while turning the phone back on. It’s important that your iPhone is connected to your computer with iTunes running for this to work.

    DFU mode led to moderate success, iTunes recognized it and allowed me to restore the firmware to 1.1.4. However when it restarted it now only displays a black screen with one white block in the upper left-hand corner.

    My plan right now is to try restoring it to an older firmware and seeing if that yields any result.

  • iPhone SDK + Firmware 1.1.4

    This is all pure speculation/wishful thinking on my part, so please don’t take it too seriously.

    I personally love the way Installer.app works, I can install/uninstall applications where ever I go, that being said I’m not looking forward to installing apps via iTunes.

    So my question is this, will Apple be able to offer the same on-the-go application management style as Installer.app with the release of the iPhone SDK? I genuinely hope so, however that functionality would likely require firmware 1.1.4 to be released alongside (or soon after) the SDK with a major overhaul to the mobile iTunes application.

    Completely doable, but will Apple choose to follow the logical example set by Installer.app? If they plan on allowing developers to sell applications it makes great sense financially, after all I’ve purchased more than my fair share of stupid games for my cell phone at random times when I was utterly bored and had no form of entertainment readily accessible.

    That being said, what do those of you who actually own an iPod touch or iPhone think?

  • Installer.app Crashing

    If you have problems with Installer.app suddenly crashing when you’re trying to install new software, fear not! Here’s the quick and easy way around that. This solution should apply to any firmware version, however I’ve only tried it on 1.1.3.

    It has to do with not having enough free space, so first you’ll need to uninstall a few applications, then download BossTool (under the Utilities category).

    Next, open BossTool and click “Free Disk Space”.

    Now hit the “Relocate Applications” button, you’ll see a pop up asking you to confirm, do so and let it do it’s thing.

    After it’s completed head back over to Installer.app and try installing several new applications, it should work just fine now.