Slashdot Mirror
Hack Turns iPod into PDA
Liquidape writes "Provue Development has released a personal info and contact manager app called iPod Organizer. The program enables use of iPod for storing and retrieving phone numbers, email addresses, flight numbers, appointment times and other data. It also comes with a sync feature. " Obviously it is fairly limited just
because of the input for this device, but its quite a clever hack.
Just go into CompUSA and download your favorite PIM into your iPod and take it home.
Now all we need to go with this is a firewire enabled stylus that reads what I write in the air and translates it to incorrectly spelled text and mislabled ToDo lists.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
Does the music change depending on what data your retrieving? Like SMB, the music starts to speed up as your appointment approaches.
I might have read the article wrong, but this looks like all it does is use the iPods built-in menu system and just makes a bunch of mp3's based on what you input into your "PIM", kind of like "$ touch meeting-at-12:00-mc_donalds.mp3" ...
I bet there's a bunch of MP3 players you could do this with.
Free Mac Mini
That is what people were expecting when Apple announced that it would introduce a device that would revolutionize the world. And that is what people have done without waiting for Apple to keep us waiting for the next big thing. So I've been tired of waiting for Apple to respond to the need of their customers and I just got this. And I just love using it. It's funny that the developer web site shows only Mac OS 9 screenshots though... Stupid Steve! Go Steve! ;-)
PPA, the girl next door
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Well we already know there is an Office port for the iPod. or was that porting Office via your iPod?
Now all the iPod needs is wireless ethernet. Then someone could hack up some software that will automatically discover and sync music collections with near-by iPods.
So, this isnt a hack to the ipod, but rather a hack to make the personal info appear to be an MP3. Clever, indeed.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
What would be a nice addition is to have the program automatically generate a short MP3 of the touchtones for the contact telephone number.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I have an iPod, I don't own anything else Apple makes. It works fine under windows for me with the windows software out there. Just search for Windows iPod and you will get there.
I guess you could write a small program to enter the telephone numbers and names save as an mp3 with ID3 tags as contact name and a small MP3 file with the DTMF tones to dial the contact. To bad redboxes don't work any more or the ipod would make a nice phreaking tool.
For anyone that has an iPod or is just interested in hacking them, goto iPodHacks.com. It can give you some ideas of what the iPod is capable of.
--Metrollica
I ran across this link at www.macnn.com apparently it's a free (for prersonal user) program that is basically exactuly the same. http://www.kohlenbach.de/prod_ipoadress_engl.htm
Damn....you saw straight through my theatrical posting as though it were....um....see-through.
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
For those of you who don't want to pay the $20 to try the iPod organizer hack, try some free ones that do a similar job.
Mp3 phone list
Address organizer
iPDA study
--Metrollica
and ask the government to ban 802.11 or, more likely, ALL wireless transmissions (Better safe than sorry). After all, all those people with cell-phnores are really just pirates in the making.
But wait... When I play music sound travels through the air to other peoples' ears! Better get a bill mandating encryption on air, or at least locking down people's ears so they don't participate. Sure we'd all be unable to communicate and, for that matter, breathe but we must preserve Intellectual Property!
It would be nice to make some use of the fact that
:(
the ipod can play music: encode the phone number
as DTMF (or DMTF, whatever it's called) and save it
in the mp3 file. So when you want to call someone
you just play the mp3.
I'm still missing that feature for my iPaq
Yeah Taco, we know. It doesn't have a three-button mouse.
I counter that Windows sucks because it doesn't work with iPod.... but for an even more clever hack, how about turning your Apple Newton into an iPod: Here's the site
at the details (id3 tags used as appointments) this has about as much relevance as the guy who makes a swimming pool by placing a hose in the back of a pickup truck.... This could be done with any MP3 player that supports id3 tags and subfolders. Why not step back 2 years and look at the mp3 players that had (semi)-REAL pims built into them. The second generation mpman (MP-F30) comes to mind, I owned one and it worked great in linux, and also let me store phone numbers, contacts, etc....Not much of a threat to the PDA market...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
it might have been clever when this guy did it a couple of months ago, but it's not clever anymore.
> Obviously it is fairly limited just because of the input for this device, but its quite a clever hack.
Typical Apple -- it lacks three mouse buttons!
I have a Samsung Yepp E64 and it has this "phone number feature". Its kind of gimicky, but then again - so is this hack. I found myself just for the novalty of it entering in a few phone #s but I never use them and have deleted them to give me more room on my meesly 96 megs of space.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Sorry. The industry has made me cynical.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"shaw, LAMEST Hack in history" jess, im surprised it took these guys that long to make this piece a poo software, ALL IT DOES IS MAKE MP3's with "organizer" data in their ID3 tags. im SOOOOOOOOO NOT impressed. Is this even a hack?
Maybe it's not a new or original hack. But it is an interesting course that ventures into doing more with MP3, which I'm certain that Microsoft is just thrilled with.
:)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
The versatility in the iPOD that allows for this is the sign of a well designed product. It takes more time and thought to design a product that both serves its original purpose and allows for upgrades and changes to be made succesffully. I suspect apple will use the iPOD platform for other purposes as time goes on as there is really no other motivation for engineering this amount of flexibility.
You could set up the MP3 file to play the touchtones. If you do, you should probably add a few seconds' pause at the beginning, since you'll need to get the iPod headset to the phone headset after playing with the buttons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah you stupid mother flurcking piece of poo face moderators, don't you know how to read a whole flurcking comment before you moderate it? Come on. What a joke. I wish I was a moderator all the time so I could mod all the good posts -1 offtopic of -1 overrated, and all the funny posts +9999 funny, cuz funny stuff is all that matters.
What?
Whatever happened to focusing on the positive? Using moderation points to mod up the good posts. After all, reading the good stuff is more important than filtering out the crap. I do that on my own by browsing at +3.
What?
You mean like Fabtek's Work Boy? Frommer's also did an organizer - do a web search to see the ROMs (don't use them of course - that's illegal).
-- SIGFPE
Use the iPOD for storage on a digital video camera. Just add a lens, a ccd, and a little processing to the firewire input. Sure beats tape and the component nature of the resulting device would make it easier to upgrade.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Yeah no kidding. I'm considering becoming a troll myself. I've posted 400+ comments on /., I've been a member for a long time (user # 14792), and frankly, in the past year or so, I have had very few meaningful dialogues, or seen very few meaningful dialogues here on /.. It's going down the tubes. The comments used to contain more useful information than the article. Now all the comments are "it's a hoax, that's stupid, this is stupid, I'm too dumb to read the article, etc." What happened to intelligent conversation on /.? Someone posts something asking a simple question, they get flamed into the great beyond for not being l33t enough to know everything about everything. Bah. /. is no longer the nice friendly community it used to be.
What?
There was a forum somewhere on /. for this once, but it wasn't really publicized.
What?
There's an organizer app that runs on the Apple MP3 player?
cool. now all we need is an MP3 player that runs on Apple's last organizer (and one that's GPL, to boot).
oh wow. now how about a new Apple PDA?
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Actually, the newton is playing mp3s!
See: MAD for the Newton and the corresponding iTunes plugin.
0 1 - just my two bits
The bigger piece of the pie, the one that Apple never game us with the Newton (and still hasn't) is a complete description of how to use the iPods Pixo embedded operating system to program other functions which are more familiar to PDA-people like: sorting, searching data enry via FW keyboard, or FW stylus if you could figure out how to make the display touch-sensative, being able to tell the machine "Make me an appointment with Carol at 5:00 next Tuesday for 2 hours, to ring 45 minues before", and it would auomatically look up Carol in the adressbook modules, check you calendar app to make sure there are no conflicts (and alearting you in that case), then placing the datbook entry, changing the ring parameter to "45 minues before meething" I dont' know if Newton Intelligence (built into the final MP2100) could do quit all that, but it might.
Right no, people trying to extend the iPod past "just an MP3 player" are stuck with the system the iPod has now - basicall a file browser. If Apple would release the lower-lvel APIs to access the hardware and compile C programs down to assembly (for porting Sphinx and Festival, as well a WICKED fast BrickOut game)
Apple did, after some pressure from the Newton community, release the in-house plug-ins and header/libray files for their MPW compilation system (God, what a beast) From the released stuff, people are starting to do some really cook stuff with it, as the recent beta test of an ATA card driver for the Newton by >a href="www.kallisys.com">Paul Guyou has shown, as well as the port of Waba for the Newton by Sean Luke. One person figured out how to do assembly language code programming for the StrongARM chip in Newton, and used this as the basis for a MOD file music player. Another project is aimed at porting an MP3 player to the Newton (I don't know if this is in working beta state yet, but I believe it it)
But many if not all of these endevours "going behind NewtonScript" would be much easier (and faster) if Apple could be persuaded to release all the appropriate headers, memory maps, memory proctection schema in public view (with a licence that says you can't use this in a competing product - althought that would have to be clarified as Apple to my knowledge has never definitively said yea or nea on ever producing a PDA again.
If the QuickDraw hooks were available (the Newton uses a stripped down SE-vintage quickdraw), then program like Waba, instead of using NewtonScript bytecode to do the drawing, which is slow, it could draw directly do the screen. Having the interface to the "Inker Port" which runs the pen input device, would make getting taps and drags to activate the applet faster, as you would have to go though NewtonScript to get them as is done now. If the full specs relating all the communications claases in the "below-Newtonscipt" layer were known, it would be easier to access the serial port, eternet cards from down there.
Some people call for the entire source code to be released, but from what I've heard it was an enourmous mess of speghetti code. But the headers and glue files for the current machines (100,120,130,2000,2100 I believe) could help access these lower level features, which seem to be becoming more an more important as the few Newton users left push their machines to their limits and face compatibility problem with desktop systems.
I don't know about Apple releaseing the entire source code. On one hand, if they released the whole thing, we'd have it but no roadmap; on the other hand, if they cleaned in up, took out the headers and glue, wrote some more comments, it would be VERY expensivive for them (especially as most of the original Newton people are gone from apple) However, in the case that they released EVERYTHING, a community of developers would quickly develop I'm sure to try to figure out what the code does, what should be thrown away in a new implementation of a PDA, and what would be of use to current Newton developers.
Persuading Apple to release the source to the connectivity applications (Newton Book Maker, Newton Tool Kit, and Newton Connection Utilities) would also help, as these apps are the ONLY apps that can interface with the Dock application built into the Newton's ROM. The authentication protocol used includes a DES-encrypted challenge-respononse. This is a BIT of a hitch to making new connectvity apps that can work with the native Dock (as you'd have to after you'd wiped the Newton clean)
Ogg-Vorbis support.
The middle mind speaks!