This blog somehow became very popular among iPhone hackers and users in the last year, mostly due to my Cydia articles and iPhone HOWTOs. Well, I hope you enjoyed that cause that’s not gonna happen anymore; this Friday, I’m getting an Android. Why? Well I’m glad you asked.

1. Number one reason to justify this switch can be said very simply: Apple. Their product was revolutionary – the iPhone is to the cell phone market what the iPod was to the MP3 Players market and don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing product. There is, however, a divergence of ideas in my relationship with Apple. They like their users locked in, powerless, doomed to abide by Apple’s terms of services. What’s worse than that is that Apple has absolute power over what it created. It’s not wrong per se – hardware-wise (hello, Gizmodo!), but for everything else, it’s a dictatorship. Everything is closed-sourced. Apple has the right (and abuses it) to refuse third party applications for whatever reason they choose, even if it’s merely because it implements a feature better than the way Apple implemented it, but they’re not afraid to steal features from said third-party developers when comes the time to release a new OS (WinterBoard, BossPaper, Backgrounder, etc). Look up what they’ve done in the last few years, from their multiple app refusals to their unsaid definition of the future of Mobile… I will not support that.
2. Another reason would be that, well, I’ve been there and I’ve done that. I know the iPhone inside and out and there’s not much left that I can experiment save from taking the thing apart (which I will invariably end up doing with my 3G once I get an Android).
3. Sony Ericsson just came out with the Xperia X10, and she’s a beauty. It’s available on Rogers with for a relatively expected cost. I’m still debating the device a bit, but it’ll be an Android. It’s not an iPhone, but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough to be familiar and different enough that it might be a whole other thing.
4. Android. It’s backed by Google. It’s open-source. I like the philosophy, anyone who knows me know that I’m a fierce open-source advocate, it makes sense to support an open-source community and leave a tyrannical one, even if the alternative wouldn’t be as good. Fortunately, it appears to be.
5. I will not need to hack it up to get it to do what I want. Well okay, Rogers (my carrier) has locked the Xperia X10 to Android 1.6, and I will have to investigate as to why they’ve done that. I might need to hack around a bit to stick it to the man and get Android 2.1 on it, but that’s expected. Carriers are abusive, restrictive assholes and will always be – I’m willing to deal with that for lack of viable alternatives.

All that to say that from this point on, this blog (whatever it is) will turn its focus from the iPhone to the Android, more specifically and in all likelihood, the Xperia X10… with Rogers. I will document my evolution with this new and unknown world that is Android and hope that it will help you solve your problems or maybe even convince you that Apple is the new Microsoft, and you should switch before you side with a corporate giant who wants to control and restrict everything there is going to be about the emerging market that is mobile.

I was wondering, last night, if I’d really have to wait for everyone to implement the new Facebook Social Plugins, more specifically, the new embeddable “Like Button”. I think it’s a pretty cool alternative to replace everyone’s “Share on Facebook” annoying popup link. That being said, I decided I’d throw a little JavaScript together, actually inspired by Damon Cortesi’s DM Deleter for Twitter, I put together a bookmarklet to insert a “Like” button virtually anywhere (and by that, I mean on any site/page you visit).

First, for those who want the result before the explanation, drag this link to your browser’s bookmark toolbar: Like This

Alright, now for the smart people, here’s a breakdown of what this puppy does:

javascript:(function(){
var h=document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
var m1=document.createElement('meta');
m1.setAttribute('property','og:title');
m1.content=document.title;
h.appendChild(m1);

var m2=document.createElement('meta');
m2.setAttribute('property','og:site_name');
m2.content=window.location.hostname;
h.appendChild(m2);

var m3=document.createElement('meta');
m3.setAttribute('property','og:url');
m3.content=window.location;
h.appendChild(m3);

var s=document.createElement('iframe');
s.scrolling='no';
s.frameborder='0';
s.allowTransparency='true';
s.style.border='none';
s.style.overflow='hidden';
s.style.position='absolute';
s.style.zIndex='100';
s.src='http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href='+encodeURIComponent(window.location)+'&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light';
var a=document.body.firstChild;
document.body.insertBefore(s,a);
})();void(0);

What that is gonna do is relatively simple and most of you will be able to guess it just by looking at the code above. It creates three META tags, one for og:title, one for og:site_name, and one for og:url which are all required by Facebook to display the data that you actually like.
Once that’s done, it creates an iframe, exactly the same as just getting the Like Button code from Facebook and puts it as the first element of the body tag, making it the first thing you see on the page, technically.

This is mostly a little toy, but feel free to use it if you’d like! I’m not too sure why, but when I tried this at home, it would pop up a Facebook login window instead of just “Liking” whatever I was supposed to be Liking… this morning, it doesn’t. So let me know what you experience if you try it out.

Edit: ReadWriteWeb is also saying they’ve got a “Safe” bookmarklet. But theirs don’t add meta tags

This is the single most important thing that’s happened to the iPhone alternative market since the jailbreak came out.  David “planetbeing” Wong somehow managed to run Android on an iPhone, dual booting with OpenIBoot. Check out the video below, then check out planetbeing’s post about this, and get the files for what he calls iDroid! It’s not clear yet whether this works on anything but iPhone 2G (as used in the video) – I wouldn’t try this on a 3G or 3GS just yet. But still, this is pretty big!

There is a known bug in the latest version of WP-prettyPhoto that basically prevents it to work as intended. While you wait for an official fix, which will come soon, here is what you can do to make it work:

1. First, identify the problem. Look at the source code of your page, within the prettyPhoto javascript stub, there is a value called “autoplay”. If that is not set to true or false, you have the bug.
2. In your admin options, deactivate the plugin then reactivate it.
3. Go in the WP-prettyPhoto options and change the value of “autoplay”, you can change it back later.
4. Look at your source again, “autoplay” should be set and your pictures/videos should pop up nicely.

Thanks to Brad Keeling who reported the bug to me (as opposed to bitching on twelve different forums) and confirmed the fix.

If you’ve ever jailbroken your iPhone in the last months, you know how much of a necessity the freedom of an independent third-party alternative can be. The guys involved in cracking Apple’s continous efforts to fortify the box their customers agree to be locked in have been doing excessively great. Whenever Apple released a new firmware version in beta, they were on the case trying to get around the various protections to allow users the freedom to choose. They would do so impressively fast, too. Now, with iPhoneOS 3.1, Apple decided to up the ante.

Should you decide to update your pre-3.1 device to 3.1, Apple will make it so that not only does it wipe your jailbreak data, but make it nearly impossible for the user to manipulate the device in the future. As it is a highly technical subject, I’ll simply direct you to Jay “saurik” Freeman’s article which covers everything you need to know about this particular topic.

That being said, there’s a hard reality out there. 3.1 is out, and iPhone owners want their devices — may they be jailbroken or vanilla — to run the latest firmware. It’s absolutely normal, and even encouraged. Nowadays, you need to stay on top of software updates for security purposes, if anything. To that reality, you can add the current problem those people have: you can’t jailbreak 3.1. Today, I’m going to enumerate the possibilities that lay before you as a jailbroken iPhone owner who wants to update to 3.1. more…

I’ve thought a bit about the concept of Twitter’s Follow Friday, as well as some insightful arguments by friends and decided I would follow their alternative method to suggest Twitter users. Here’s my first list in this series.

1. @mashable (Pete Cashmore): I love Mashable news and the way they deliver them. This account is obviously used to aggregate content posted on mashable.com but Pete often manually updates his timeline. If you’re a web geek or have any interest in social media and the Internet as a whole, be sure to follow him.
2. @rww (Richard MacManus): To follow in the same line of content as mashable, ReadWriteWeb is also a very good source of technology and social media news. Most of Richard’s updates are done via TwitterFeed, but like Cashmore, he often post updates himself.
3. @michaelgeist: Michael Geist is without any question the Canadian copyright laws vigilante. If you have any interest in topics such as freedom of speech, copyright and digital politics, you won’t want to neglect his input.
4. @oggy (Agustín Vazquez-Levi): Agustín is, aside from an excessively entertaining tweeter, an authority in SEO/SMO, Analytics, and digital marketing. If you’re striving to stay on top of these topics in terms of evolution, following Agustín is a great idea.
5. @xutopia (Gary Haran): Frontend ninja, Rails genius and aggressively opinionated  atheist. Entertaining all the way.
6. @afrognthevalley (Sylvain Carle): Sylvain is Montreal’s local web celebrity. CTO of Praized Media, president of Alliance Numérique and Alliance Internet, board member of Île Sans Fil, co-organiser of WordCampMTL and iPhoneDevCamp… and so on. To stay on top of Montreal’s tech events, he’s the one you’ll want to keep track of. He also tweets in French under @sylvaincarle.
7. @evablue (Eva Blue): Eva’s kind of the official photographer for every cool Montreal  events. She’s also quite insightful and fun to talk to/hang with.
8. @TamyEmmaPepin (Tamy Emma Pepin): Hired by Tourisme Montreal to improve Montreal’s digital tourism campaigns, Tamy does quite a good job at sharing interesting Montreal-related information, events and media.