Hackulous - the development team behind the Apptrackr website and Installous iOS application which have been one of the most popular sources to get pirated paid apps published on Apple's App Store announced closure of there services with immediate effect.

The website now shows the following notice and Installous app displays : "Outdated version. Installous will now terminate" or "API Error. API unavailable." followed by an forced quit.

With all the IPSW firmware versions, various Apple devices and a variety of tools for jailbreaking the whole process becomes very confusing. While working with custom firmwares and jailbreaking one must follow the correct sequence of steps with right tools and software versions, otherwise iTunes throws an error and the device gets locked down in a restore or DFU loop.

One such often encountered error while restoring an custom IPSW file using iTunes is - "An unknown error occurred (Error 1600)." as shown below.

Apple blocks users from restoring older iOS firmware's, while this is a good security feature and a method to avoid OS fragmentation. This also prevents users from using jailbroken and carrier-unlockable software versions.

This practice makes iOS upgrade difficult for users relying on software unlock like ultrasn0w which is supported on older basebands only, If you are trying to upgrade an Apple device to an non-supported iOS version even when using TinyUmbrella - the iTunes restore process may throw up error 3194 and 1600 as shown below.

Here are solutions to get past these errors and flash custom, snowbreezed IPSW files to your Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod's.

We have shared trick's to unlock the ipod volume lock, the forgotten Apple iPod Touch Pin Code, and the iPod's Forgotten PassCode. Luckily, the trick to reset the forgotten screen-lock without loosing the data (factory reset) on Apple iPod is still same for the newer model. This time we have an easy to follow step-by-step video tutorial on how to get rid of this problem.

While unlocking a forgotten passcode on basic Apple iPod is not very hard neither is the resetting of volume lock as shared earlier, you might be unlucky if you have a non-jailbroken Apple iPod Touch and does not have the PC you last synced via iTunes with you as the only option to unlock the disabled iPod is to use your original PC with iTunes. The only solution to get rid of this situation is demonstrated ahead.

Skyfire is a popular mobile web-browser available on Windows Mobile, Google Android, and Symbian platforms, unlike other mobile web-browsers Skyfire renders requested webpages on a proprietary server and then relays the result to end user's mobile phone. Using the same server-side rendering technology Skyfire is now available on Apple iOS letting users enjoy Adobe Flash powered videos on webpages which is not natively supported. While Flash has already been ported to some extent on iOS via Project Frash but Skyfire is available via official Apple Store and does not require a jailbroken phone to work like Frash.

iPhone Dev Team has posted the latest update to hugely popular Windows jailbreaking tool for iDevices as redsn0w 0.9.6b1, allowing users to jailbreak iOS 4.1 & 4.2 Beta this release is capable of jailbreaking iPhone 3G, iPod Touch 2G at iOS 4.1 or iOS 4.2 using the age-old pwnage2 DFU-mode exploit.

Apple iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 3G support Zoom In and out features for accessibility reasons, this functionality is meant for users having difficulty in viewing small text/graphics. If you have left this feature ON and accidentally triggered the Zoom (double-tap with three fingers) leaving you stuck with a Zoomed-in screen here are the steps to get things back to normal by resetting it to the default zoom values.

The cat is finally out of the bag as Apple announced the iPhone OS 4.0 update, here we have a list of most important new features and updates introduced in the Apple mobile OS platform complete with a video walk-through.

There is nothing exciting or worth upgrading in iPhone OS Update 3.1.3 but if you still want to upgrade and keep the jailbreak it is now very much possible thanks to updated redsn0w 0.9.4 utility by iPhone Dev Team, do keep in mind if you are using an unlocked iPhone do not upgrade as no unlock is yet released for iPhone OS 3.1.3.