New iPhone SMS alert!

Last week, Pathfinder and I were both getting distracted from what we were doing when either of our phones paged. There's really only one SMS alert tone that I find acceptable, and that's "Glass". Unfortunately, I guess I'm not the only one that considers most of the others useless. The big problem I have is that I need something to ring twice, especially if I'm sleeping and need to be woken up (yay nagios). Others of them I just won't hear (Bell and Chime), they sound too much like AIM (Tri-tone), or they're just plain ugly (Horn and Electronic).

So, thanks to the wonder of jailbreaking, I made my own, a nice Japanese Bell. There are a bunch of guides out there on the net that tell you how to make an alert suond, but surprisingly I can't find the one I used anymore. Short story - open your sound file in iTunes, change it to AIFF format, export it, rename the file to sms-received#.caf (where # is 1-6) and scp it to your iPhone at /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received#.caf. It will replace whichever sound is indicated by #. (I replaced 4, the Horn.)

Now Path and I will never be confused again! (unless of course, he reads this post and is so enamored by this tone that he installs it too. That will never happen.)

Oh, while looking for the replace-your-sms instructions, I came across this site that tells you how to increase the length of the vibration that your phone does in addition to the tone when you get an SMS. (of course, since I'm not on windows, I can just scp the .plist file over and edit it directly. Saves a lot of steps...) The only thing I chose to do differently is make the settings 0.4s on, 0.1s off, with 1.5s duration so I get three short vibrates rather than one long one.