(Jailbreaking is reversible and basically legal. And what jailbreaking basically does is install an ‘alternate’ app store named Cydia that’s full of thousands of apps, tweaks, and themes that Apple would not have approved.)

Here’s a list of apps I bought and/or downloaded from the Cydia app that makes my iPhone 4 MUCH more deaf-friendly:

Vibrafications – set up custom vibrations for different actions (SMS versus mail versus Twitter / Facebook notifications). Vibrations can be of different patterns and lengths. You can even set up custom vibrations for different people!

3G Unrestrictor – make it possible to use FaceTime and several VRS apps over 3G, not just wifi. Came in handy when I needed to call AAA for service.

Notified Pro and Notification GriP – set up “quiet” notifications on the top or bottom of the screen and which does not interrupt your work or play. No more intrusive iPhone notifications in a box in the middle of your screen. So many freaking options to customize these whichever way you want!! A definite MUST-have for me. More on this on a later blog post. (EDIT: I use the PushMail app – from the regular app store – to send me push notifications whenever I get new email. Similarly, I use the free Boxcar app to send me Twitter notifications.)

LockInfo – extensively customize the lock screen to show a variety of information. I have this set to dim after 5 minutes and to display emails, SMS messages, and notifications. So that means I can just glance at my iPhone at least once every 5 minutes to see if I have new messages instead of having to frigging turn it on and checking different apps. LockInfo comes with numerous plug-ins as well to display even more info – calendar, Twitter, to-dos, etc.

BiteSMS – send and receive SMS messages in a small window on your screen from inside any app or the lockscreen. No need to switch to the Messaging app. Wish there was something like this for mail messages!

These are just a handful of handy jailbreak apps I use to make the iPhone a vastly better experience for me as a deaf person. I know – iOS 5, announced for release this fall – does nearly all these (except for BiteSMS). Where do you think Apple got its ideas?

In addition to these, I use quite a few more jailbreak apps to improve the overall experience, like SBsettings (quick access to common Settings), Snappy (quick photo-taking), MyWiFi (ahem, using my iPhone as a wifi router for laptops or iPads when on the road), InfiniDock (having more than just 4 apps on my dock bar), FolderCloser (close a folder upon launching an app), and many more.

Go forth and jailbreak!

This is where the iPhone Sorenson BuzzCards app becomes really, really handy.

With this app, you can easily type and save your order. The words are easy for the cashier to read (even from the car in a drive-thru!), and the font size automatically increases or decreases to take up all available screen real estate.

You can give titles and even categories to your orders for later reuse. Easy to use the same orders over and over again (or even do minor tweaks each time):

You can even flirt from across the room using the BuzzCards app!

Oh yeah, it’s hard to beat the price: free.

My only beef: Comic Sans font. C’mon, how can anyone take you seriously!?

UPDATE:  Here’s one for my favorite toy store.

Heads up: a new subtitled bonus video at the end of this blog post — this time, of my younger daughter walking for the first time!

Four months ago, I told you about Overstream, a website where you can easily add subtitles / captions to your videos. Several of you (including myself) mentioned that while this website was wonderful, there wasn’t a way to move your captioned videos from one site to another.

I’m happy to tell you that Overstream now has made it easy to export your captions / subtitles to other video-hosting websites.

Max, the creator of Overstream, recently added a feature where you can save your subtitles as a “.srt” file. An SRT file pretty much just contains your subtitles and the times in hundreds of seconds that they are to appear (and then disappear) in your video. I believe SRT files are similar to what is being used by major television and movie producers, but I could be wrong. And I also believe this is similar to what rather complex subtitling computer programs create — like Subtitle Workshop and MAGpie.

Anyhow, on Overstream, after you’re finished creating your subtitles, you can then click on “Tools” to see an option for exporting current subtitles as SRT. Click on that option, and then you’ll get an option to save the subtitles as a file on your computer or copy all the subtitles (and time codes) to your clipboard. (Hey Max, yet another suggestion: can you add buttons to allow the user to move the current video frame back or fro a half second, a second, and five seconds? I found myself constantly re-positioning the arrow showing the current video frame.)

Last July, I told you how Google had added a feature where you can upload “.srt” files which is used to add captions / subtitles to videos. This is where you can import the SRT file you created with Overstream, or even paste the subtitles into a special text box.

And thus, I was able to easily subtitle my 21-second Google video of my younger daughter walking for the first time! Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how I did this:

1. Upload my video to Google Video
2. Go to Overstream.net and create a new Overstream (series of subtitles) using my new Google Video as the base video
3. Export the subtitles (via the Tools button on the Overstream Subtitles editing screen) to a SRT file on my computer
4. Go back to Google Video, and view my “Uploaded Videos“
5. Click on the “Add” button next to “Captions / Subtitles” for that video
6. Upload my SRT file to Google Video
7. … and hey presto, the video is now subtitled!

A huge benefit of using Google Video and an uploaded SRT file is that the subtitles can be turned on or off (!!!) using the “CC” button at the bottom of the video screen. The subtitles appear just below the video itself. Doubling the size of the video or making it full-screen still makes the subtitles look sharp — the subtitles aren’t stretched and distorted, but rather the font size is increased by Google Video. Very nice. When the video is embedded on another website, like what I’m doing below, the captions seem a bit small — but that seems to be a Google Video issue and not Overstream’s.

The SRT export functionality brings the Overstream – Google Video duo to the top of my list of recommended sites to use to caption your video. Thanks, Max, for listening to us and adding this super-duper-terrific functionality! Makes me think — it’s not easy for a sitemaster like Max to allow users who create media on his site to take this media elsewhere, so I really appreciate the new Export SRT file feature that Max added.

What’s that? You want me to shut up now and show you the video? Ok, ok! Without further ado, here’s the video of my younger daughter walking for the first time!

Until now. Sorenson recently announced that they’ve added call-waiting functionality for users of its VP-200 videophones.

Now, for those lucky VP-200 users, when another call comes in while they’re talking with someone, a visual notification will appear on the television screen. The user can then put the first caller on hold and talk with the new caller before returning to the first caller.

Ah, the freedom to be like one of those Mean Girls, constantly switching back and fro between callers and playing games with each other! I’m positively salivating at the prospect. Too bad I’ve still got a VP-100 videophone … Hey, Sorenson, can I have a VP-200 soon? Pretty please?

But now there’s a reason for deaf folks to have a Skype account. Skype has paired up with Spinvox (which I briefly wrote about several months ago) to convert voicemail on Skype accounts to text messages (otherwise known as SMS) that can then be sent to any cellphone.

This could be an useful pairing for us deafies. If you’ve got hearing family members who use Skype for low-cost or free voice communications through the Internet, now they can call your Skype account and leave a voice message for you. The voice message will then be converted to text and sent to your Sidekick or Blackberry (or Treo if you’re lucky and geeky enough to have one) as a SMS message.

If you do this, let us know in the comments what you think of this service.

(Thanks, Download Squad!)

Here’s a list of selected videos with captions. Clicking on any of the videos on this list displays the video on a separate page (with video screens a bit larger than YouTube’s videos, I should mention) — with captions turned on by default at the bottom. Clicking on the “CC” button at the bottom turns captions off if needed.

Here’s the announcement by a deaf Google employee of this captioning functionality, from nearly a year ago. A Google help page explains how to add captions / subtitles to your video; this is actually done via a separate file created by a program much like Subtitle Workshop and which is already being done for the shows we see on television. Hopefully more and more content providers will upload these separate captioning files along with the shows and clips being sent to Google Video.

Nice to see a major video website provider with this type of functionality. Hope the others implement this as well.

• OpenCaptions is somewhere between alpha and beta — meaning that it’s still under considerable development and is probably slow and buggy, and the person who created this site knows and is admitting it.
• Registering for a new account felt “slow” — there were obvious delays when loading the registration webpage. But once I actually created captions, the process went smoothly and quickly.
• Only accepts Google Video, YouTube, or any Quicktime video already on the web.
• Video is left on these video hosting sites, and captions are only shown on top of it via OpenCaptions.com (much like Overstream and BubblePly). Captioned videos can be embedded onto a website or blog (unless you have a blog with WordPress.com, like I do – ugh!).
• Nice feature: colloborative captioning – you can invite a friend to help you caption videos.
• Relatively easy to add captions, but then it’s difficult to match it to the correct place on the video. Adjustments are made by clicking on “End caption” at the correct place, or clicking on the double-arrows (a nice feature) to move the start / end time back or fro one second. But more often than not, I felt like I was flying “blind” because the video playback itself didn’t show any seconds — a sorely lacking feature, in my opinion.

(Click on the video for a larger version)

• To watch what you’ve done thus far, you have to save as a draft and then click on “Watch,” which pops up the video in a separate window — again, difficult to edit your work this way.
• Captions are displayed a bit too far down below the video, below the playback controls. I’m used to seeing the captions / subtitles either right on the bottom portion of the video, or just beneath.
• Very nice ability to adjust the font size of the captions and even invert (from white-on-black to black-on-white) during playback! I’ve never seen this elsewhere.
• This seems to be an experiment by a NYU researcher, so I’m curious if this will be improved upon anytime soon (the first and only blog entry is from January of 2007) or even if this will stay around much longer.
• I would say that, thus far, dotSUB.com remains the easiest way to caption videos on the web, with Overstream in second place.
• See my other reviews of creating subtitles using Windows Movie Maker, Jumpcut, Subtitle Workshop, Overstream, YouTube, and dotSUB.

Click on this picture to watch the captioned video of my daughter spelling out names. Have fun!

While dotSUB.com‘s main function is to subtitle videos, it also has an important additional function: the video can be set to allow others to add subtitles in other languages. The viewer can then select the language s/he wants to see the video in — if English, then only English subtitles would be shown. If Russian, then only the Russian subtitles would be shown, and so on. This is very handy for more professional-quality yet low-budget videos which need assistance into being translated into other languages.

Compared to all the other video editing software or web services, with the possible exception of Overstream (see my recent review), dobSUB proved the easiest to upload videos and then add subtitles to them. I created my account in seconds, and easily uploaded a video of my two daughters. The hard part was finding where to click to actually add subtitles — I figured out I had to click “Transcribe Film.” I then got a screen with a mini-version of my video along with some simple controls and a list of surprisingly sophisticated keyboard commands. Next to the video were rows upon rows of text boxes in which I can add subtitles and easily set the seconds each subtitle would appear and then disappear.

Within minutes, I had fully subtitled my 29-second-long video. I found it easy and fun to use, and playback was quick and easy. It was easy to set the seconds, and to set it so that there were “pauses” (no subtitles) in between each line. Once I finished, I clicked “Done.” Once I knew I was really finished, I then clicked on “Mark Transcript as Complete.” But by doing so, dotSUB would consider this video final and would not allow any more changes to subtitles in that language. And I only wish I could download this video and then move it over to YouTube — but I couldn’t. Once completed, the subtitles (and the video) stays on dotSUB.

Again, WordPress.com doesn’t allow me to embed videos from companies other than the usual suspects (like YouTube and a few others). So, click on the picture below to view the video of my older daughter pulling my younger daughter around.

See my other reviews of creating subtitles using Windows Movie Maker, Jumpcut, Subtitle Workshop, Overstream, and YouTube.