Filed under: iPod Family, Hacks, How-tos, iPhone
TUAW Responds: Adding a Stand-Alone Contacts Application to your iPhone
I can't tell you the number of readers who have written in asking for a stand-alone iPhone Contacts Application. It's not something that I particularly was trying to solve for myself (I don't mind tapping Phone then Contacts) but this morning, I stumbled on a simple way to accomplish this on your 1.1.3 iPhone.
This is, I'm afraid, right now a command-line only solution although it's relatively easy to automate. Someone from modmyifone should be along any second to offer an Installer-based solution. Here are the steps:
Update: I'm hearing from readers that "Customize" an iPhone app has done this for previous iPhone releases. Hopefully they'll have a 1.1.3 solution out soon. In the meantime, you can follow my steps by hand if you like. It's not difficult.
1. Locate MobileAddressBook.app It lives in your iPhone's /Applications folder.
2. Copy it to another Applications folder. I personally use /var/mobile/Media/Applications/ but you can use any other folder on your Media partition that you've set up for Application use. Try not to overfill the main /Applications directory. Your OS partition has limited storage. Some people prefer to make a symbolic link from /Applications to ~/Applications. I prefer using the (sneaky) /Widgets folder for my symbolic link rather than /Applications for its relatively high safety factor. (Yes, any application placed into /Widgets gets recognized by SpringBoard as an application.)
3. Give it a new bundle identifier. Edit the Info.plist file in the application bundle to give it a new, unique id. Any non-standard (i.e. not com.apple.MobileAddressBook) string will do. You'll probably have to convert the Info.plist from binary to text form. My plutil for iPhone will do this. (plutil -c xml1 Info.plist) This lets you run a second copy of the application without messing with the original and without conflicting with the bundle ID.
4. Remove the SBAppTags section. This consists of an array with a single string, "standAloneContact". You need to remove all 4 lines: from the key to the end of the array.
5. Restart SpringBoard. You can reboot the iPhone or use any number of restart utilities. Once re-started, your new version of the Contacts app will simply pop into place now that you've re-identified it and gotten rid of the app tags.
Enjoy.
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Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
HSL said 7:53PM on 1-28-2008
The new bundle identifier is not even necessary, you can just remove the tags and you're ready to go!
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webmin said 2:40AM on 1-29-2008
Worked fine as per instructions - Thanks Erica (Jailbroken 1.1.3 all the way up from 1.0.2 many months back)
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guybrush said 4:10AM on 1-29-2008
It IS difficult...!
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oj said 10:34AM on 1-30-2008
BigBoss' "Poof" application doesn't seem to work on the MobileAddressBook application. Even though it's in Poof's list of apps to show...
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BigBoss said 4:06PM on 2-23-2008
Fixed in v1.1
BigBoss said 5:50PM on 2-23-2008
Fixed in v1.1
chris said 12:25PM on 1-30-2008
Maybe i'm retarded, i'm saying that i'm not, but i just could not get it work, i followed erica's guide, that guy's guide and nothing, please someone feel sorry for me and e-mail the goddamn .plist file at criistih@yahoo.com, thank you
and yes i have 1.1.3, i know how to ssh into the phone etc.
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poetic_folly said 2:57AM on 1-31-2008
Hey hey Erica, sorry it took me so long, but I've got a solution based on yours and the comments here (thanks OJ Dorson, your solution worked extremely easy) up on Installer now. Very easy, less than 1 Kb in fact. ;)
You can find it under Productivity listed as Contacts | HomeScreen. ModMyiFone.com source of course, but if you've got Community Sources installed, you've got that already. Enjoy.
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Magpie said 3:14PM on 2-04-2008
Think I will just wat for the developers kit
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BigBoss said 4:05PM on 2-23-2008
I added this to Poof v1.1 since Poof is the only way to hide/show icons on 1.1.3.
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Marc Rosen said 11:16PM on 2-27-2008
just add "standAloneContacts Boolean Yes" to the M68AP.plist file in the capabilities section and restart the phone.
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