Enabling third-party applications on your iPhone has never been easier. Just visit jailbreakme.com on your iPhone/iPod touch (hereafter "iPhone"), and thanks to a TIFF exploit in MobileSafari, the website will jailbreak the phone and install Installer.app. As an added bonus, the process will patch the exploit it used to hack your iPhone in the first place. And who said all hackers were bad?
Technorati Tags: iPhone, jailbreak, TIFF, exploit, Safari, iPod touch, hack
Erica Sadun, TUAW's resident iPhone hacker/developer, reports on the difficulty of jailbreaking the new iPod touch. An iPhone update is expected sometime soon to add iTunes WiFi Store functionality, most likely a few of the UI niceties present on the iPod touch, and hopefully some long awaited applications (Tasks and iChat, I'm looking at you).
If the iPod touch's (or perhaps OS X 1.1's) ability to be jailbroken is any indication, then iPhone owners should enjoy their third-party apps while they can. Now, there may be a technical reason for the new sync scheme that prevents jailbreak, but a more likely culprit is a political reason: AT&T is upset. First, by introducing the iPod touch, Apple offers a way to bypass a cell contract for those wanting most (but not all) of the iPhone's features. Second, Apple's inability to keep the iPhone locked down for any significant amount of time (whether intentional or not) has paved the way for software unlocking, providing yet another way to get iPhone features without an AT&T contract. Depending on how large a fee (if any) Apple collects from AT&T for new iPhone contracts, Apple is largely indifferent as to whether they sell an iPod touch or an iPhone. It is unlikely that Apple would lock down the touch but not the iPhone and it's not unreasonable to conclude that our time spent sipping on Cocoa will soon come to an end.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPod touch, jailbreak, OS X, unlock, hack, Apple, AT&T
Scott Gilbertson of Wired writes on how the iPhone is breeding the next generation of IE4-only web sites in the context of iPhone-optimized sites:
In suggesting that developers use the web to build iPhone applications, what Apple has done (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) is force the creation of a subset of the mobile web that only works with the iPhone’s unique features — namely the touch-screen interface.
While Apple is pushing HTML and JavaScript for iPhone app development, they aren't (inadvertently or not) forcing the creation of sites that only work with the touch screen. In fact, I recall reading (correct me if I'm wrong) that the iPhone browser doesn't even support draggin or hovers/mouseovers. There's very little in the way of iPhone-only features (only a few CSS attributes and the tel:/map: protocol for dialing and Google Mapping, as I recall) and so the only way sites are being iPhone-optimized are that they're being dumbed down for the device, thanks to a lack of support for Flash and some JavaScript events (and possibly more). Furthermore, most iPhone-optimized sites are extensions of existing sites. There's no killer app for the internet out there that we're all missing out on because it only runs on the iPhone; hell, there isn't even a web-based killer app out for the iPhone (and I saw this as a launch day iPhone owner).
To be honest, I find all these iPhone-optimized web sites to be completely garbage. This stems largely from one thing: the sites are attempting to mimic Apple's native UI. Of course, the web apps have two huge disadvantage when compared to Apple's apps: they're loading data over a (potentially) slow data connection and JavaScript performance is atrocious on the iPhone.
For something I truly wanted to use heavily, I would go out of my to find a mobile, but not iPhone-optimized, site to use over its iPhone-optimized brethren. The two big winners in the mobile but not iPhone-optimized category are Google Reader and Twitter. I use both daily primarily because they're lightweight (prettier, slower competitors to both are out there). The most recent loser: Facebook – and I'm sure there are many others, but I stopped using them so long ago I can't even remember any of them.
The shoddy state of the mobile web being what it is, I went and jailbroke my iPhone last week, allowing for third-party apps to be installed. It was fairly straightforward, though I had to piece together instructions from a handful of websites to actually get it done. Tonight's release of the Mobile Twitterrific proof-of-concept also spurred me to get the iPhone development toolchain installed. Also, fairly straightforward except for finding out what the hell a "heavenly dmg" was (it's an unencrypted version of the iPhone restore image). There's nothing absolutely must-have out there yet, but it's only a matter of time. You don't really get a sense of how powerful and extensible the iPhone really is (or could be) until you've run a terminal on it or ssh'ed and sftp'ed in.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, standards, Wired, web apps, Web 2.0, Cocoa, hacking, JavaScript
