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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" ...
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.
Just because an idea is easy to implement, don't assume that "somebody has done this before". If you know of someone that has, provide a link. Yeah, it's something that could be done on lots of other MP3 players, but apparently no one did. And at the risk of being flamed, I suspect that this idea would be patentable.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
What the iPod displays when you select a song is the ID3 tags that are stored in the MP3 files. Then this program just creates a bunch of MP3 files with silent sound tracks (and low bitrates) with your contact information stored in the Artist/Album/Title ID3 tags.
I've notice some people complaining that you can't add contacts on the go, so this is worthless. I think that misses the point here. The iPod is an MP3 player. Apple has never claimed that it can do anything else. But if you carry it around with you all the time, this is a nice little hack to add a little extra functionallity. Nobody is claiming that this makes the iPod a full featured PDA.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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
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
it might have been clever when this guy did it a couple of months ago, but it's not clever anymore.
...and I would say that it makes the iPod a minimally functional PDA, but not a full fledged PDA. Everything he (or she) said was true. The complainers here are moaning about the submitter did not point out the limitations of using the iPod as a PDA, but if you've ever picked up an iPod, those limitations are kind of obvious. The iPod is a storage device, and the only input is for navigating what is already there. The iPod is supremely good at that. Asking it to do data entry would be like asking your keyboard to spellcheck.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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)