Podcasts in iPhone

Today, I am going to talk about podcasts.

You can search even more about podcast information by yourself, so I do not have plan to talk about regular information about podcasts. I just want to talk about listening experiences after I used podcasts.

Before I contact with podcasts, I have no idea about special power of podcasts. I listened to MP3 songs to kill my time, where most of these MP3 songs are boring and stupid. After I received an iphone 3gs sent by my young brother, I still do not know the special power of podcasts. I copied many boring and stupid songs into the 3gs. I listened them about a month.

I started my podcast experiences until my brother told me that subscribing podcasts is for free, podcasts charge nothing. Because I do not have necessary to pay for it, I just take for a trial.

English songs are not interested me, so I searched ESL (English as an second language) material. I am so surprised because there are so many channel in podcasts and some of them are high quality.

After experiencing some operating, I just know that podcasts are on-demand channel, differentiated from AM/FM broadcasts. It means that I can prevent listening materials which I do not want to listen and I can listen to materials which I want to listen at any time. Listener have to listen materials which they do not want to listen and Listener have to listen in special periods are two serious nightmares while listening to AM/FM broadcasts. Although podcasts are not able to present live channels, I do not care about it.

Podcasts improve usability of my iphone even more. Functionality of podcasts in itunes are better then other applications. I tried some other applications with podcasts, and I found itunes has the best functionality so far.

Bad product with bad design

I brought this clock from Yahoo. This clock is very cheap with many functions, but such a product can make a human to be an idiot. The reason is bad design. You can notice that the clock displays hour:minute:second, but its bottoms arrange as second:minute:hour. I do not believe that this design brings us correct experiences. You can imagine that I can cause confusion for a while when I rush to operate it.

Successful products has its reason to be successful and vice versa. I do not know about everything, but I believe that better designs have more opportunities to be successful. The opportunities never belong to this clock and its designer.

We can see many bad designs in out life, bad design can brings us inconveniences, hazards, and dangerous.

To Jailbreak iPhones

A jailbroken iphone can be compared with a generic iphone. They have different advantages and disadvantages. To jailbreak an iphone can reveal the most ability of its iOS, but most of jailbreak tools are written by untrustworthy hackers. Codes for jailbreak tools should never be examined, so your iphone has risks to be a zombie computer if you jailbreak your iphone. In fact, some happened instances show that a jailbroken iphone can cause threats for users. However, this issue should not cause problems for me because I know existence of this problem. The most important reason is that I have no 3G account since I do not have much money, so my iphone only connects to Internet when it connects to a WIFI AP. At the same time, I am using the iphone. Therefore, I should notice that my iphone has something wrong when my iphone is going to do zombie commands.

Jailbreak actions are declared legal but jailbreak actions disobey Apple's warranty. Your jailbroken iphone has to be restored before requiring Apple's repair. Fortunately, most of jailbreak actions are able to be restored. On the other hand, the reason which jailbreaks an iphone is legal is easy to be understood because you can do anything legally for your stuff even if you burn your iphone.

An iphone with jailbroken should be installed cydia to install 3th-party softwares. Cydia can be treated as apt package manager with GUI because it uses deb packet format. It is very easy to use and very convenient. Actually, cydia likes 3th-party iTunes store due to you can buy applications and softwares by using cydia. However, softwares brought from cydia has almost no warranty which is compared with iTunes store. The applications installed by cydia brings less stability then Apple's official applications do. Again, the applications installed by cydia have opportunities to be malicious. At least, I do not think that trusting cydia is good.

iphone3gs

My brother sent me an iphone 3gs at December 11th 2010 since he brought an iphone4. Before I received this 3gs, I just treated it as a cell phone with some trivial functions, such as games and mp3 player. After I received this 3gs, I aware that I was wrong.

Smart phones are light-weight computers. For example, 3gs is a computer with 600MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, and 32GB(optional) flash memory. A 3gs is significantly faster than a pentium computer. You can imagine that it may produce a 1024-bit RSA key within several seconds.

The operating system of iphones is named iOS. The iOS is extremely closed because it can only run applications downloaded from iTunes store. An iphone can never run any custom application unless you publish your applications in iTunes store. Apple examines all applications that are going to be published in iTunes. Applications will deny to be published if they cannot obey apple's rules. For example, illegal or malicious applications will be avoided to be published. Apple claims this mechanism ensures security, however, I never think so. The closed system is extremely inconvenient for me.

Fortunately, iOS is not an absolutely secure operating system. Hackers attempts to jailbreak iOS by design flaws of iOS. A jailbroken iOS reveals all iOS's function. You can treat an iOS as an unix-like operating system. In order to do my jobs efficiently, I downloaded well-written jailbreak-tools to jailbreak my 3gs. My 3gs can run bash(unix shell), gcc(compiler) and more so far. It means I can run almost applications that I want.

More experiences may be shared when I want to practice my writing in English.