iPhone Hacks Rant

[Harbinger]

Hackers are racing to create what, I think many of us hope, Apple will eventually role into Software Updates for the iPhone.

Of most interest to me are local applications and wireless sync.

So far, hackers have created a “toolchain” which allows you to compile programs for the ARM architecture the iPhone uses. SSH was the most important program to get onto the phone because now you can “terminal-in” to the phone, a ton of command-line utilities still need to be ported over.

Apple File Sharing, or more naturally Samba File Sharing which is both mac & pc friendly, will allow for wireless syncing.

Apache Web Hosting from the iPhone means local applications.

This is the system I envision:


An alias, or shortcut on the PC, to a folder on the iPhone.
I drag and drop a movie, word doc, pdf, jpeg, or mp3 to the iPhone folder alias, which transfers the file wirelessly to the phone.
I load up Safari on the iPhone and surf to http://localhost:whateverportiwant
The webserver ON THE iPHONE will load an iPhone-friendly set of php pages that allow me to access jpegs, pdfs, word documents, music or a movie I just uploaded to the phone.


With a robust-enough web app hosted on your phone you can now edit documents by providing a web-friendly “Copy Keyboard” that has a “Begin Copy”, “End Copy”, and a “Paste” button. You also break out of limitations currently implemented by Apple. Let's say you compile the ogg or xvid codec for the iPhone. The iPod software won't read these files, but your iPhone-hosted web app could with the installed codecs.

I suspect Apple will release much of this technology through "true" iPhone apps. Clearly they won't provide all the functionality we want, that kind of power would undermine their product offerings.

Making these functions work over a web-based system, however, is going to allow for some serious magic to occur on the platform.

Here's the start of it. (http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/07/25/iphone.open.source.hacks/)

[Surf Monkey]

This is very typical for Apple. They tend to release hardware and software with the most limited feature set possible. Then, as hackers and developers discover ways to expand and customize the functions of the device/application/OS they adopt those methods (or similar ones) and roll them into the official spec. Even though Apple is a design maverick, they're extremely conservative in a lot of ways.

[Surf Monkey]

Oh, and running SSH on iPhone would seriously kick ###.

[Harbinger]

Hackers are half way (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Dropbear-ssh) there.

Now it's a matter of getting it to an interface we can access on the phone.

I totally agree with your assessment that Apple is extremely conservative in many ways. I just hope they don't see these hacks as threats to their products, otherwise expect some serious lock downs to occur during the first iPhone software update.

[Surf Monkey]

Yeah, I just saw this article (http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/07/25/iphone-now-running-multiple-open-source-applications-thanks-to-improved-build-tools), which says pretty much the same thing as the one you linked. Awesome!

[Harbinger]

Anyone got this (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mressl/webshell/) running on their iPhone yet? It's a web interface to an ssh shell.

The caveats to WebShell running on an iPhone appear to be:

First you need to make sure python 2.3 or later and OpenSSL are installed on your system. You will also have to install the pyOpenSSL python extensions to OpenSSL.

[mrdantownsend]

sounds sweet

[Harbinger]

So we've now got SSH and Apache on the iPhone, now we need a method to access the iPhone's files wirelessly.

Oh, that's right. We do (http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/27/tuaw-tip-put-iphones-file-system-onto-your-desktop-with-sshfs/).

Next stop, wireless sync, extensible media player, and ssh out.

[MOCKBA]

What's more important for me? Apple uses ARM processor, so I can port IBM J9 VM easily. I can run any programs after that. Anybody is going to iPhone developer conference in August? Please publish here your impressions.

[Harbinger]

I recently used iFuntastic to do some jail breaking, very straightforward app. Can't wait for the next version and custom app installation to appear.

[Rasengan]

after a few hours of modding, this is what my home screen looks like...i've also changed the dial pad and the calculator backgrounds:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v637/branas/IMG_0038.jpg

[Harbinger]

Absolutely bad a$$.

I read over at Engadget that the 1.01 update does not affect third party modding apps.

Are you duping the file system to save your hacks?

[Rasengan]

Absolutely bad a$$.

I read over at Engadget that the 1.01 update does not affect third party modding apps.

Are you duping the file system to save your hacks?

that's right, 1.01 did not affect hacks at all

basically, once you unlock or jailbreak the filesystem, you can do whatever you want with it...everything, and i do mean everything is changeable since all those pretty graphics you see are all .png's...you can even change your battery charging when it's hooked up since it's all just series of like 7 or 8 different .png's that show the battery's current capacity

so all you're doing is creating your own .png, in my case i've been scouring the internet for clean looking .ico and converting them into .png, then resizing and cleaning up the image, then transferring to the iPhone in the appropriate folder to overwrite the old icon.png

also within the iPhone's folder structure is how to change the arrangement of your icons, you can completely remove the bottom dock area, change the look of your signal bars, add a few missing icons like Field Test and the mysterious DemoApp application that seemingly plays a video on loop, etc...this phone is almost completely customizable!

[Harbinger]

So, about samba on the iPhone...

Look what I found (http://wickedpsyched.com/iphone/samba/) today.