Ripdev

Today, a new iPhone OS, 3.0 has been released. This is obviously a big and long waited for update for all iPhone users. And we believe, it is about time to officially announce that we are discontinuing support of Installer platform for iPhone and iPod touch.

Over past 1.5 years when we were involved in the Installer project (first in 3.x versions, then in 4.x), a lot of things has happened and we believe it's time to unify the installation platform for the iPhone — and clearly, over the past year this is DPKG, thanks to tremendous effort of Jay Freeman and his Cydia. We have also dropped our two cents by providing our own themeable and lightweight DPKG installer tool, named Icy.

So now you have a choice, which tool to use — and no matter what you choose, it will be compatible with each other. We obviously cannot speak for Jay, but we will do our best to make sure two products play nicely together.

The Installer 4 repositories we manage will be running until July 1st, 2009, then they will be discontinued and brought offline. So if you wanted to get something that is only available in the Installer — this is the time to do so.

We would like to take the opportunity and say “thank you” to everyone who has contributed and supported Installer project in any way. You rock.

We proudly present a new version of Icy, 1.4. It was tested on 2.2.1 and 3.0b5 firmware versions, and everything seems to work great.

A first thing you will notice is the new icon. This is something we wanted to do all along since pre-1.0, but unfortunately Max was busy for a while, so we only got the icon a few days ago, but I think it was worth the wait. :)

Full change list is available on the Icy webpage, but overall, this release is aimed at providing customizability and fixes.

Customizing Icy for Your Skinning Needs

We have been contacted by many people to adjust the look of Icy so it fits their theme, instead of pure black and white look. The biggest challenge was to keep the speed (app launch time, overall GUI responsiveness) the same as before while giving the flexibility to the theme makers. I believe we have achieved that perfectly.

So, in order to change the Icy appearance, include the file named IcyThemeDefiniton.plist in the theme bundle. Icy will automatically see it and use the definitions from there.

The following keys are available for the IcyThemeDefinition.plist file:

• StatusBarStyle (string): can be either "black", "white" or "transparent". Defines the appearance of the status bar style in the application.
• NavigationBarTintColor (string): defines the global color for all navigation bars used in the application, unless a specific section overrides it (see below).
• TableBackgroundColor (string): defines the global table background color (or pattern), unless a specific section overrides it (see below as well).
• TableSeparatorColor (string): defines the global table separator color, unless a specific section overrides it.
• TableTextColor (string): defines the global table text color, unless a specific section overrides it.
• InstallBackgroundColor (string): defines the install/remove pane background color (or pattern).
• PackageInfoBackgroundColor (string): defines the package info background color (or pattern).

How to define a color: a color string may be either a triplet or quad of digits separated by comma, or an image file name. It's easier to give some examples:

• 0,0,0: black color — each digit is a floating point number from 0 to 1, inclusive. If fourth digit is given, it is an alpha value.
• 0.5,0,0: dark red (0.5 red, 0 everything else)
• DottyBackground.png: pattern loaded from the image DottyBackground.png in the theme bundle.
• (empty): clear (transparent) color.

As you can see, you can easily customize the appearance of Icy by defining the keys above. If any key is not found, a default value is used. Now to make things even more flexible, you can define the colors for each section of the application. If any section-specific key is found, it will override the global one for that particular section:

• NavigationBarTintColor_Packages, NavigationBarTintColor_Sources, NavigationBarTintColor_Search, NavigationBarTintColor_Installed
• TableBackgroundColor_Packages, TableBackgroundColor_Sources, TableBackgroundColor_Search, TableBackgroundColor_Installed
• TableSeparatorColor_Packages, TableSeparatorColor_Sources, TableSeparatorColor_Search, TableSeparatorColor_Installed
• TableTextColor_Packages, TableTextColor_Sources, TableTextColor_Search, TableTextColor_Installed

You can also specify custom category icons in your theme — simply include the files named CategoryCATEGORYNAME.png and if present, the specified category will use that image, for example, CategoryThemes.png.

If you need more flexibility, let us know. :)

There's one our product that is probably not much known outside of Russian market — i2Reader Pro. It is an eBook reader for the iPhone supporting most of the features you'd anticipate from the reader — autoscroll, landscape and fullscreen modes, changeable styles, tap zones, and so on.

The reason it was not nearly as popular as on the Russian market is because it only supported FB2, an XML-derived book format in use by most Russian eBook libraries. So after a significant amount of work i2Reader now supports EPUB, PDF, RTF and DOC in addition to FB2 and TXT formats — which should make it possible for most people to actually use it.

It also includes a nifty built-in Wi-Fi server to share your books with other devices on the same Wi-Fi network as well as with your Mac OS X box running i2Librarian, a free app we made as a companion to i2Reader.

It also features a bunch of other Network services it missed in version 2.x - such as a built-in Web browser so you can instantly download books, and i2Scribe, our own online store (currently mostly featuring Russian books, but we're working on getting English content in there as well).

It has a 3 day trial, so why not give it a try — it is available in Icy/Cydia and Installer near you.

More info…

It took much longer than we have anticipated, but the Microsoft Windows version of InstallerApp is finally out. It works on anything from XP to Seven, and requires an installed iTunes. Otherwise, give it a go. License purchased ties to the devices, not the app itself, so it doesn’t matter which platform you use - the activation codes will work regardless.

Download. Try. Buy ($7). Or Trash if you don’t like it ;)

We're glad to announce the immediate availability of InstallerApp 1.0.2. We have worked hard to work out most of the minor kinks that have prevented us from doing a major feature update work — so enjoy this version and we'll be focusing on new features for the next update.

What's new?

• Added iPod touch 1G support (iPod touch 2G is not supported at the moment)
• Added More Information panel to view additional information about packages
• Improved processing of packages with dependencies
• Upgraded device integration module and iPhone support
• Improved interaction with iTunes
• Enhanced support for numerous packages
• Added most popular packages (in terms of user feedback) to the “Featured” category
• Added YouTube support for “unlocked” iPhones
• Added tooltips for package status icons
• Added notification for packages with unknown sources
• Added new command-line utilities for packages that might require them
• Added ability to “Force Delete” packages that have dependencies (including “circular” dependencies)
• Improved package synchronization process
• Fixed “Recent packages” issue where recent packages would not show
• Fixed application crash after unexpected device disconnect
• Fixed error with package refresh after adding or removing sources
• Fixed issue of recognizing package status after synchronization
• Number of other minor fixes

Download now or view product info.