The Blog of an African NERD

ToneFXs 1.5 for the iPhone is now available

If you like custom ringtones on your iPhone, you will love ToneFXs. We have updated ToneFXs to version 1.5. It is a free update for currently registered users. Not much has changed on the surface. It is under the hood where a lot of work has been done.  We had to make some major changes behind the scenes to serve as the foundation for version 2.0. These changes we have made give us the power to do some really amazing things with sound customization on the iPhone. That being said, there are a few cool things in this new version.  Thanks to the encouragement of Jay Freeman ( Saurik ), ToneFXs is now WinterBoard compatible. Even cooler is that it lets you use any of the WinterBoard sound themes you have downloaded and apply them to any of the sounds of the major apps. We have also streamlined Ringtone Shuffling, maker it even easier and faster. ToneFXs is available in Cydia. For more info, please visit http://www.tonefxs.com 

Maybach Music ringtone

While I was leaving NYC from the iPhone Madness last week, around the Holland tunnel area, I think I may have spotted Jay-Z’s Maybach. Of course you can’t see him cause the curtains are drawn and yeah they are perfectly like a Picasso painting. For real, press the play button on the Image above. Rumor has it that he has a house in this area and I had seen him in some paparazzi picture on theYBF entering what seemed to be a Brown Maybach. So off course the next thing down I-95 was listening to Maybach Music over and over and dreaming how I will move up from my 350 slk to a Maybach when am ready to be chauffeured around. By the time I got back to Maryland, it had to become a ringtone for my iPhone. Now here is the real sweet part about iPhoneRingToneMaker. I can actually make multiple versions of the same ringtone for my iPhone. So now I can choose if I want the chorus or that ridiculous verse he had on the song.

Thoughts on the iPhone SDK

After announcing the iPhone, His Highness( Steve Jobs ) once said
"You don’t want your phone to be an open platform....You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

With comments like these, it was a bit hard to fathom what we witnessed from the launching of the iPhone SDK on March 6th. Talk about a 360 degree change in policy from a company known for being hardheaded and standing it’s ground.

At first glance, am very impressed with the SDK, but then am probably still stuck in the Mr. Jobs’s reality distortion field and once our developers fully dive into the SDK will we know just how legit this all is. Regardless, March 6th for the mobile developer community was probably one of the most important days in history. For one, it marked the culmination of the efforts of a never say die developer community that did whatever it took to get apps on the iPhone despite Apple not wanting us too. Once Apple realized it could not prevent the avalanche of 3rd Party apps, it was forced to release a public SDK.  I have had many discussions with many of the iPhone Jailbreakers and hackers form the 13 year olds to Mr. ziphone and believe me, what all these folks have accomplished is a large reason why you saw what you saw on March 6th.

The launching of the SDK also marked a new sign of hope for developers. With the Palm OS dying anyway and nothing exciting on other Platforms, things are looking bleak. This new iPhone platform provides a viable avenue for 3rd party developers like us to make good money while developing some of the most amazing apps you will ever see.

So what does this mean for us here at Gx5/Efiko Software?
Well, we have had a great run developing Palm OS apps. We were fortunate to have best sellers that include UltimatePhone, TreoMemo and TreoWeather. Until the rebirth of the Palm OS, we have stopped new development for Palm devices and pretty much now have our sites set on the iPhone( and android by the way). Unlike the limitations of the Palm OS, the iPhone provides us a free canvas( knock on wood) to do some of the most creative things we could ever have imagined and we can’t wait to get started. Actually, we have already started, we are now just doing it the official way.

Thoughts on Apple allowing users to put custom ringtones on the iPhone using Garageband

As the Project Manager for iPhoneRingToneMaker, I really take pride in that we were part of the reason that forced Apple to do this. While we were not the first to release a custom ringtone solution, we were the first to release a commercially viable custom ringtone making product that was drop dead easy to use and allowed users to create as many custom ringtones as they wanted. Then iToner came along and many other developers came up with some neat ways to get ringtones on the iPhone. All the above got Apple’s attention and they proceeded to release updates that essentially foiled the functionality of iPhoneRingToneMaker, iToner and other methods. However, Apple did not realize that it is really hard to kill a mosquito and within weeks, we and these other developers had found ways around the roadblock Apple had put up.
Things were fast becoming a cat and mouse game, with Apple releasing updates( sometimes hurriedly) and us burning the midnight oil trying to get iPhoneRingToneMaker working again.
Then all of a sudden, Apple itself starts allowing users to put custom ringtones on the iPhone using Garageband.
So did Apple throw up the white flag and realize they can’t stop us all from finding ways to put custom ringtones on the iPhone? I would say no. Upcoming updates will show if Apple is still tenaciously intent on foiling custom ringtone apps or if they are tired of playing this cat and mouse game. One thing has been clear though. iPhoneRingToneMaker and iToner have been huge successes with tens of thousands( could be in the hundreds as I don’t know iToner’s numbers) iPhone customers purchasing these apps and should Apple intentionally foil them, there could be another heavy dose of animosity and complaining by iPhone customers towards Apple, further alienating many of these customers, who are still simmering from the iPhone 1.1.1 debacle.

With Apple allowing users to now put custom ringtones with GarageBand, it means we need to innovate, get creative and introduce new features that make the ringtone experience better.  We have started doing this with the latest release of iPhoneRingToneMaker, which now allows you to shuffle your ringtones.  This is a pretty cool thing if you have many ringtones and you just don’t know which one to pick. This is only the beginning. Barring any new cat and mouse games with Apple, we should hopefully be introducing even cooler things you can do with ringtones on your iPhone.

In summary, without iPhoneRingToneMaker, iToner and other tricks by other developers, Apple would have had a free run at making a bazillion amount of dollars from selling ringtones at the expense of giving users the freedom to put any ringtone on the iPhone, while feeding us this baloney about why there needs to be drm on ringtones.

Here comes iClueless

As the Project Manager on this application, I want to give a big shout out to our developers who worked round the clock to get this done within two weeks.

What a difference 5 years makes

It was just over 5 years ago when as a College Senior I was in California visiting my sister. I was reading in the newspaper about this so called macworld event. Since I did not know much about macs I decided to go. It was pretty overwhelming seeing all the cool new sunflower iMacs.  So I decided to go to the balcony and get a better perspective of things. While I was up their, two men were approaching the same area I was. One was in  jeans and a black turtle neck shirt( if my memory serves me right). As they got closer, it was apparent they were coming to the balcony to get the same view I was getting. It became clear that one of them was Steve Jobs.  I stupidly ignored the other guy, and proceeded to be awestruck of being in the presence of Steve Jobs. Say what you want, the man has the “Presence”. I proceeded to shake his hand and if I recall I did not let go cause well, I was in awe. By the way the other guy I was ignoring happened to be Jonathan Ives.

Now here I am today, being a nasty little mosquito in Mr. Jobs’s plan to make a bazillion dollars off ringtones and of course they have apparently tried to squash us with the change to the syncing method of iTunes, thus causing minor problems for iPhoneRingToneMaker.

Never in my wildest dreams when I met him face to face would I think the day would come where I would be issuing a press release touting how my product is better than his.
What many don’t realize is that the ringtone business is a billion dollar one. So don’t let Steve Jobs’s casual demonstration of Apple’s ringtone offering fool you. The man knows big money when he sees it.
So to think just like yesterday I was in awe and today am a disruptor of the multimillion dollar ringtone scheme of Mr. Jobs is kind of mind blowing.

Note: while I conceived and spearheaded iPhoneRingToneMaker, it was only made possible by our talented team of coders, ui artists, web designers etc

iPhoneRingToneMaker vs Apple's iPhone Ringtones

Learn more about iPhoneRingToneMaker here

new version of iPhoneRingToneMaker

We are happy to let you know we just released an important free update to iPhoneRingToneMaker which
-Supports songs purchased from iTunes for Windows XP users
-Better syncing of ringtones with iPhone.
Learn more about iPhoneRingToneMaker here

iPhoneRingToneMaker giveaway on macrumors.com

We are giving away 5 copies of iPhoneRingToneMaker to readers of macrumors.com. Ever since we started developing for the iPhone and iPod, we have come to rely on this site on a daily basis to stay up to date on the latest Apple news and more importantly what Apple is up to in the near future. Learn more about this giveaway at http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2007/08/15/iphoneringtonemaker-giveaway/

thinkmac.net gives iPhoneRingToneMaker 4.75 Apples

read it here.