Filed under: iLife, iPod Family, Hacks, How-tos
HACK: Enable adding calendar events on your iPod touch
Hackers Nicholas "Drudge" Penree and Tony Hoyle have figured out an easy fix that allows you to add calendar events to your iPod touch. You'll need read/write access to your touch and a full jailbreak but once you do, all you need to do is add the following two lines to the N45AP.plist file inside your Core Services' SpringBoard app.
<key>editableUserData</key>
<true/>
The plist is found at /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/N45AP.plist
Update: Reader Andi notes that you need to put the editableUserData under "capabilities" not under "root" in the property list.
Update 2: If you'd rather use a text editor rather than the property list editor, convert the file to text-based xml. At the Mac command line, you can do this by issuing plutil -convert xml1 filename.plist. To convert back use binary1 instead of xml1.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
luke said 3:59PM on 10-11-2007
Wait. Did I miss something? Is there a published hack for the iPod touch? I thought the hacks that have already been released were iPhone only? Someone please enlighten.
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Stephen Lang said 4:06PM on 10-11-2007
Where have you been the last 3 days? ;-)
Since a jailbreak is required, this substitutes for copying over the iPhone Calendar app. I guess this is better, since if you are copying over the iPhone version it needs to be 1.0.2 (probably not much difference though.)
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Jon Oakes said 4:09PM on 10-11-2007
Hmmm, quite a bug that needs to be fixed...
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Eric Carroll said 4:12PM on 10-11-2007
do the edited/calendars created on the iPod Touch sync back to the Mac nicely like with iPhone?
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yacoub said 4:23PM on 10-11-2007
Awesome now if only there was a one-click process to jailbreaking the touch. I have no interest in complex combinations of downloads and command lines and other mumbo-jumbo.
Give me a file I can download and run that will take care of everything up to and including installing Installer.app or whatever. Then we're talking.
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Jon said 4:25PM on 10-11-2007
Wow. If it's obviously this simple, why on earth does apple go out of their way to cripple the calendar app?
Maybe they are going to start selling calendar events from the iTunes store or something...
.99 to buy the event, and .99 to edit it! Sweet!
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Jesse Gillespie said 4:34PM on 10-11-2007
This feature epitomizes my disappointment with the touch. While Apple has made compromises for "lesser" products before, to my knowledge it has never engaged in direct software crippling to differentiate products. I always associate such malarky with Microsoft.
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Frank said 4:38PM on 10-11-2007
@6 - My guess is that the decision to make it non-editable was to maintain consistency across the iPod line. iPods since gen 2 or so have had the ability to read calendars and address books from Macs but not write to them. So I think Apple's just trying to be consistent:
- All iPhones can read/write cals and addresses
- All iPods can read only.
I'm sure the distinction will go away someday, I guess the question is do we have to wait for the iPod "classics" to be discontinued first and replaced with an all-touch lineup.
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a ham sandwich said 4:41PM on 10-11-2007
yeah really. epic lame apple. thats not a bug. thats intentional crippling. WHY?!
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Mo said 4:41PM on 10-11-2007
@Frank: My iPod has the ability to write to address book entries (and add new ones, and sync with my Y! address book).
All of those things I would have expected to be iPhone-only, but they're not. The only thing I can't do is add/edit calendar events. It's just plain bizarre.
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db cooper said 4:42PM on 10-11-2007
Oh Apple - you are failing so hard lately. How perfectly shitty.
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cozart said 4:45PM on 10-11-2007
i agree with poster #5.
i got all excited when i saw the title of this blog post, but then was disappointed when i saw that it requires fooling with jailbreak and lines of code.
i guess it's harder to brick an ipod touch since there's no sim and all that, but i'm still wary of messing with the code and all that.
i'll wait until there's a nice one-click solution that does all this for me.
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Signed said 4:47PM on 10-11-2007
respectForCustomers
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Alt said 4:48PM on 10-11-2007
Funny, playing in the playlist, I was able to change the apps that are in the buttonBar (even bring the number of icons to 9 - but they are overlapping and not scaling down as in the Mac OS Dock). But I never was able to add the calendar feature that would allow me to add an appointment...
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Signed said 4:48PM on 10-11-2007
= false
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Andi said 4:51PM on 10-11-2007
Put a the boolean sibling editableUserData under "capabilities" and set it to true -> gave me editable calendar ;)
editableUserData under "root" is not working
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helfire said 4:59PM on 10-11-2007
@16 Thankyou, the article was so vauge.... Like no one verified it.
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Malcolm Taylor said 5:01PM on 10-11-2007
http://www.touchdev.net/wiki/Jailbreak_Guide
Yes there is a published hack.
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Charles Miller said 5:20PM on 10-11-2007
The semi-official word from Apple about the missing Calendar app was that it was caused by a bug, and would be re-enabled in a future firmware version.
This sort of thing happens in development all the time. You're coming up on the release date and there's a critical bug in one feature, so instead of letting the release slip, you put in a quick hack to disable the buggy feature, and ship anyway.
So yeah. It might work fine for you. Or it might cause some problem that'll crash your iPod or corrupt your data. Caveat hacker.
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mrtotes said 5:44PM on 10-11-2007
- 7
Actually Apple has always crippled PowerPC iMac/iBook graphics cards to prevent dual-displays and offer mirroring only so it's not a new trick.
The sting was that for the first week after release Apple's web site listed calendar entry as one of the uses of the on-screen keyboard.
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