phranker’s Think Tank

I got into the iPhone development community soon after I bought my iPhone. I thought it would be awesome to work with and develop apps for such an amazing phone. I’m sure everyone knows that Apple will be releasing a SDK in February, but I quickly found out that other members in the community put together an open sdk called the ‘toolchain’.

First of all, I am not a mac guy. Never was. Surely have become one  though. I want a Mac bad!! I’m saving some money to get a MacBook or MBP, but in the mean time I figured I’d install and use the toolchain under Linux. It took some time – but I got it. I have a dedicated server setup just for iPhone development. But the more I read, the easier it seems to develop apps under Mac OS, especially Leopard.

Then today, while hanging out at iPhone-Elite in #iphone-dev, a member with the nick Shade posted a link to his filebase which I have to admit is the most comprehensive archive of everything released with in the community. I mean EVERYTHING!!

What he was most proud of is, he finished working on a VMWare image of Debian with the toolchain already installed. That means all you need to do is download the VM Player, download Shade’s VM Toolchain image, and poof… you got yourself a working iPhone development platform.  Pat on the back for Shade

The official DevTeam 1.1.3 JailBreak was released a couple days ago. They are still holding on to their ’secret exploit’ until the SDK is released but I have to admit, this release is much better than the previous release by NateTrue.

The great thing about this new release is that it can be done without even using a computer – as long as your phone is already at 1.1.2 and jailbroken. In Installer you will find an app that does it all. Of course, this is aimed at those with little or no knowledge of the inner workings of jailbreaking.

Ideally, I suggest downloading the release and reading the script (install.sh) to really see what is going on. It’s a pretty ingenious method. It downloads the firmware directly from Apple, unpacks, decrypts, copies, and structures the filesystem all within the one script. It even removes the firmware it downloaded and leaves you with just a jailbroken 1.1.3 iPhone!!

1.1.3 Jailbreak Instructions
1.1.3 Jailbreak r1 || r2 (DevTeam)

NOTE: Some att customers may need to download and apply the original lockdownd file. It is explained in the instructions. Download it here.

NerveGas, a member of the iPhone Dev Team has been working on a book through O’Reilly’s online bookstore, safari.com.

Today he released it on Safari.com Rough Cuts. There are options to buy the book in PDF format or to pre-order a paper copy (to be released in May ‘08), or both. If you sign up with Safari.com you can read it online for free.

I haven’t gotten around to reading the whole thing yet; but it looks promising. Ever since I got my iPhone I have been involved in the development community. Erica of iphonedevdocs.com had put together the best collection of info on the frameworks used to develop apps for the iPhone as well as a nice list of books to use for further research. The books she recommended were for Cocoa Programming on the Mac OS. This book focuses on developing for the iPhone only. I hope after the final release of this book, I won’t need books, but I still want to get it when it comes out.

iPhone Open Application Development at Safari.com

EDIT: I was contacted by NerveGas himself and have removed the link I was given to the pirated copy of his book. I meant no harm in posting the link as I was given it by someone else in the IRC channels last night.

But it’s buggy as all hell. I recommend staying away from it until the bugs are worked out, or the dev teams release a true jailbreak.

It was released by Nate True, a good guy, but it’s not really a jailbreak. It’s a “soft upgrade”, meaning that he took the files from the 1.1.3 restore image directly from Apple and merged them into the filesystem. However, 1.1.3 has a lot of changes, most importantly, how the filesystem is strucured to operate. Apple added a user, mobile, and that user runs all the apps, instead of root which ran them in previous firmwares. This is a good thing that Apple did. It will help keep the apps people write from being able to destroy important system files.

However, Nate True’s release still has all apps being run by root, just as they were in previous firmwares, and that is causing a lot of problems with file/dir permissions. I hope to list some, if not all, of the problems with this jailbreak release by tomorrow.

I got my Installer.app repo/source up and running. Add it to your sources and see what I’ve done.

http://installer.phranker.com

Welcome to my Think Tank. All my iPhone ideas, development progress, and general info will be posted here. I hope this site can help some of you in the community.

Shout out to all the nice peeps at #iphone-dev & #iphone on both iPhone-Dev Team and iPhone-Elite Team.