It’s been about a week since the first methods for “jailbreaking” the iPod Touch and iPhones running the 1.1.1 firmware to allow the installation of third party apps. Now Mac users have an easy way to jailbreak their iPhones with the latest release of iFuntastic. Enjoy your 3rd party apps!
Tag Archive for 'apps'
Apple pushed an item to their “Hot News” page this morning that they will be releasing an official SDK for iPhone apps in Febrary. Even better, it’s also for the iPod Touch!
I figured that the first officialy 3rd party iPhone apps would basically be Dashboard widgets, but it sounds like this is much more than that, and that they plan on having good security infrastructure in place to prevent the spread of malicious applications.
The timing of the announcement suggests to me that Apple is doing everything to stay in the news in the run-up to the release of Leopard. I wonder what else they have up their sleeves.
The full text of the announcement hasn’t been published on a unique URL, so I’ll quote it here for the curious.
“Third Party Applications on the iPhone
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.
It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
Steve
P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]“
Other Coverage:
Mac users have had easy to use tools for installing iPhone mods and 3rd party apps like iFuntastic for a while now, while Windows users have had to work through a series of steps using a collection of tools. All that has changed now, thanks to Nate True, who recently released the amusingly named iBrickr, which provides easy iPhone ringtone / app management for Windows users.
He also maintains a library of 3rd party iPhone apps packaged for easy installation.
A new page on the iPhone Dev Wiki has basic source code for creating a native GUI application for the iPhone. It’s just a proof of concept, but it is huge news, and comes less than a week after people were able to run the first 3rd party app on an iPhone.
“Here’s the source to a UIKit Hello World. The iphone-binutils project has a set of header files for the UIKit in the include/ directory on the Subversion repository. If you compile this, place it in a bundle with the appropriate files, and add the appropriate entry to /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/DisplayOrder.plist, it’ll show up on the main menu.” from http:// iphone.fiveforty.net / wiki / index.php / UIKit_Hello_World
The first iPhone apps could only be accessed via a remote terminal connection. This latest news is a big step towards being able to create apps that look and act like the native apps like the notepad, calendar, maps, etc.
Image from Netkas, he also has a compiled executable.
Update: There is now a GUI application for unlocking the iPhone.
People have been hard at work putting the iPhone dev toolchain to use. In addition to SSH, they’ve compiled Apache & Python, and some other utilities. I haven’t had a chance to dig in deeper, but that combo has me wondering if people aren’t running webshell so they can have a working console on the iPhone itself. They have kindly posted binaries and install instructions for the iPhone version of SSH, python, and other tools.
