ScaleTweetie1 The way that pixel doubling makes some iPhone apps look on the iPad is one of the iPad’s only drawbacks, especially where e-book apps are concerned. However, those who have jailbroken their iPads may have another option.

MacStories reports on a way to modify some apps to make them run at full iPad size without pixel doubling. It requires connecting to your device with ssh (which is only possible after jailbreaking and installing the OpenSSH Cydia package) and then adding several lines of code to an app’s info.plist file.

The article writer tries this with several apps, including Tweetie 2 and Reeder, to see how well they work. However, he does not try any e-book apps, such as eReader or Stanza.

I haven’t jailbroken my iPad yet, though I may well do so sooner or later. But if anyone who has would like to try this method with some of the non-ported e-book apps, I would be interested to know how well it works.

(Found via JeffKirvin.net.)

2 COMMENTS

  1. This is a great idea in concept, but there is a comment below the post from someone who says that the hack doesn’t work for Stanza. According to the comment, the size of the app doesn’t change, it just moves to the top left corner.

    That said, I was sort of surprised that the original post provided the jail broken default root login and password. Jailbreaking resulted in many people opening up their iPhones to a serious security breech if they did not go out of their way to change these defaults. While it would seem likely that anyone who is going to hack their iPad would know that they needed to change the root user login and password, I doubt many people will actually do this in the excitement of getting the jailbreak up and going.

    This means there are now going to be a bunch of people out there with vulnerable iPads… So If you do decide to jailbreak, remember to change your root login and password to ensure the security of your iPad.

    Personally, I’d rather use my iPad than mess around with jailbreaking. I didn’t buy the iPad to do this type of thing. I’m content to leave it be and just use the apps ’till the native versions are released.

  2. It doesn’t work for Stanza. I tried it. In fact, because Stanza must use pixel size for button placements, any buttons or selection areas that are outside the original iPhone size are unuseable. Further dooming this is the fact that the reading screen is just moved from the center to the upper right. It does not run natively in iPad land.

    I did the jailbreak and am happily running backgrounder on it as well as my fave jailbreak app SBSettings. But I did do the jailbreak with the hope that Stanza would work.

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