iPhone 3G customisation - how to hack the keyboard and number display format for any country

Adam Turner
Monday, 21 July 2008 08:12

IT Industry - Market

The iPhone 3G 's keyboard lacks Australian customisation, but it's easy to do it yourself for any country on a Jailbroken phone.

First you need to SFTP into the phone using the instructions on the previous page. Next go to the /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/ folder and copy the Keyboard-en_US.plist file to you computer. Make a back up of it in case you need to restore the original.

The iPhone's .plist files are simple configuration files, but they can't always be edited with a standard text editor. Thankfully on the Mac there's a command line utility called plutil that can converts .plist files back and forth between binary and XML.

Under the command line, open the folder containing Keyboard-en_US.plist (make sure you've got a backup copy in another folder). Now type;

plutil -convert xml1 Keyboard-en_US.plist

Now you can open the file with a text editor. You need to add a few lines so it looks like this;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>UI-LanguageIndicator</key>
    <string>English (US)</string>
    <key>UI-TopLevelDomain</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Keycaps</key>
        <array>
            <string>.edu</string>
            <string>.org</string>
            <string>.com.au</string>
            <string>.com</string>
        </array>
        <key>Popup</key>
        <string>left</string>
        <key>Strings</key>
        <array>
            <string>.edu</string>
            <string>.org</string>
            <string>.com.au</string>
            <string>.com</string>
        </array>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>


This is for Australia, but you can change <string>.com.au</string> to whatever you want, just make sure you change it under both Keycaps and Popup. You can even add an extra string, such as <string>.net.au</string>, if you want to. Now save the file, go back to the terminal and type

plutil -convert binary1 Keyboard-en_US.plist

Finally it's just a simple matter of copying the file back to the same place in the phone's file system, overwriting the original file. The same process will let you edit other keyboard formats, such as the Keyboard-en_GB.plist file for English (UK).

Now I know nothing about iPhone hacking, yet I still managed to figure this out in a few minutes just from what I could glean from Google searches. If I can do this to the iPhone 2.0 software, why can't Apple and the telcos do it out of the box? It's just not good enough.