iPhone finds: jailbroken

I’ve got the jailbroken apps that everyone seems to have (PDANet, Winterboard, Cycorder…), but I’ve just found two others that rock my world.

First is iPhone Notes. It’s actually a Mac app; you don’t download anything to your iPhone unless you don’t already have OpenSSH (IOW, to get this app to work, jailbreak your iPhone and download OpenSSH from Cydia. THEN get iPhone Notes for your Mac). Fire up the app on your Mac, click the Save/Load button, log in to your phone, and either move your desktop notes to the iPhone or vice versa. No, no syncing. It’s overwrite one way or the other. If you change a note on the Mac and hit cmd-S, it overwrites the phone posthaste. Here is a shot of the Mac app:

As readers know, I’ve been on a mission to find a simple lists/to-do app that avoids the need for Web syncing and slow starts, and this may well do it. It’s the closest thing to using paper, which would be the method of choice if I could manage to avoid losing the paper, but I can’t, so perhaps this will do the trick. It transfers very quickly over a WiFi connection. Sync would be nice, but NOTHING out there seems to truly sync without causing major problems right now, so I’m not that upset about it. It’s donationware (yes, I donated!).

Aside: WHY can Apple not manage to do this natively? Palm had synced notes and tasks like 15 years ago!

All right. Second is biteSMS, available through Cydia, which I never tried before because I thought it was an SMS workaround that you had to buy SMS credits for. Well, it’s that too, but you can also just replace the built-in SMS app and send/receive SMS messages through your carrier (AT&T for us US folks). It’s so killer cool because you can compose SMS messages in landscape mode (without changing to another app):

Switch back to upright mode and other cool options become available. Swipe over the compose box and get the options to insert contact information or your current location:

Perhaps most titillating, you can swipe across a message and get the option to forward (yay! forward!) or delete the single message:

The biteSMS app is just flat-out free. Credit costs depend on the country/countries in question.