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This could be cool. Sean Heber of Spiffy Tech is going to release one 3rd party native iPhone app per day in November. Though he might have a spot of help on one or two days, for the most part it appears that he’ll have to do most of this herculean effort himself.

If you’ve hacked your iPhone or iPod Touch, look for the “App-A-Day” source.

It all depends on what the app ideas are. If the app’s purpose is to show a pumpkin on the main screen, it could suck. Even if it does suck, it’s still a herculean effort.

There’s now an instant method to get third party apps on your iPhone (firmware 1.1.1 only). The same methond works on iPod Touch. I have to say, this is by far the easiest method of hacking the iPhone that I’ve ever seen. This method, which relies on the iPhone TIFF vulnerability, is also incredibly simple to use; much more so than the previous AppTapp installer method for iPhone 1.0. Since it relies on a buffer overflow, I expect this method to stop working as soon as Firmware 1.1.2 is released, which could be any day now.

All you have to do is point your iPhone browser at jailbreakme.com, confirm the wish to jailbreak, read some stuff, scroll down, select ‘Install AppSnapp’, wait for Safari to quit, and wait. Your iPhone or iPod Touch should restart automatically, and when it’s all done, you’ll have Installer.app ready and willing for you to install 3rd party apps!

This method of installing 3rd party apps doesn’t require any computer software, you just have to go to the website on your iPhone browser and follow the instructions. Again, the site makes efficacious use of the TIFF exploit that’s been talked about before, so if using a security vulnerability to install software freaks you out, don’t go to the site I’ve posted after the cut.

Conversely, f you think that using a buffer overflow to install software is awesome, 31337, or k-rad, there’s a link for you and your iPhone after the break.

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While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

If you’ve been hacking your iPhone to get 3rd party apps with firmware 1.1.1, there’s now a big reward. Installer.app has been updated, and some long-needed changes have been made. First, instead of browsing the entire collection in one huge list, you now select a category, and then browse a smaller list. Under the previous system, as the list of 3rd party apps got longer and longer, the interface for finding and installing a program became more cumbersome. With the new system, the category splitting should make finding and installing apps a lot simpler to use. Also, it should do a great job of hiding dictionaries, theme packs, etc. into their own subcategories. If you’ve hacked your iPhone, this should appear as an update.

If you haven’t hacked your 1.1.1 iPhone, there’s still no easy way to do it on a mac. There are, however, rumors of an AppTapp-type installer to make everything nice and simple coming very shortly. If you’re using windows, there’s a program called iDemocracy that promises to make everything fairly simple.

Erica Sadun, iPhone hacker extraordinaire and writer at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, has documented the entire set of Cocoa function calls required to program for the iPhone. These header files are used for programmers to properly create user interfaces, network code, and, well, pretty much everything. And the documentation effort is a massive job, usually not something to be done by just one person. I know that this site can get kind of wonky here and there, so I’ll do my best to explain why this is important, but for everybody.

All of the applications available from Installer.app have been written without any formal set of documentation. So, there may be some bugs, since there’s no single place to go for programming information. Usually, Apple would provide the documentation for programming on the iPhone. But, as they’ve recently announced, they’re not going to be doing that until February. So, now anyone that is planning or writing a native Cocoa app for the iPhone or iPod touch now has the means to research how to do it.

That includes both the folks that are hacking iPhones to install and write 3rd party apps, and any larger software companies that want to get a leg up on their software development. With this set of header files, it should be perfectly possible for any large development group to prototype their program well in advance of the official Apple release.

Of course, these header files may yet change. There’s no guarantee that Apple’s set of documentation will stay the same; Apple will definitely be adding to this, and they may not allow some of the function calls documented by Sadun to be accessible for other programmers. No one can tell. But, it’s a huge step for programming native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch

There’s an easy new program you can use to jailbreak the iPod Touch, called iJailBreak. You can download the installer (which now includes both PowerPC and Intel mac support) at code.google.com. Sorry, no Windows love yet. iJailbreak makes “heavy use” of the iPod Touch / iPhone TIFF vulnerability, and its use requires that you only restart your iPod Touch. Simple enough, right? Way simpler than this, anyway. iJailbreak is programmed by a 13-year-old, and judging from the broken tabs at the top right of their website, they have an unbricker application planned.

The process for jailbreaking an iPhone manually is pretty involved; Apple’s process of securing the iPhone and iPod Touch have made the barrier to entry for installing 3rd party applications on an iPhone much tougher. If you’re looking to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch in the hopes of installing other applications or non-Apple-sanctioned ringtones, however, there are now some easier ways to do it.

First, iNdependence has been updated to perform the jailbreak for iPhones running firmware 1.1.1. So if you’ve got a Mac around, there’s now a GUI tool to run your iPhone through the hoops to get it jailbroken. I’ll post up a tool for Windows as soon as I see one, but for now it seems Windows users are stuck with the tough method; iBrickr hasn’t been updated yet but remains the best hope for you.

Second, if you’ve got an iPod Touch, there’s an automatic jailbreak tool that’s available from iPod Touch Hacks that will do it all for you on both mac and windows. Both use the recent TIFF vulnerability.

It looks like Apple might have some web apps of their own that are perhaps going live very soon. Both the Register and the Boy Genius Report indicate that the ‘recent downloads‘ (RSS link) page of Apple’s points to a few iPhone web applications. It unfortunately looks like Apple has wised up, and removed the applications from their feed, but you can at least view the screenshots in all of their glory courtesy of tBGR. Although they’re in Apple’s download RSS feed, all indications point to this web app directory being simple repository for online web apps. That is, not web apps that are run from your iPhone, aka widgets.

I’ve claimed over and over that the iPhone is built to buy things from iTunes. One of the things that we should be able to buy from iTunes is programs. Games, if that’s your thing; mental diversions. I’m glad to report that 9to5mac.com says that it’s coming. Of course, they call it 3rd party development, which is kind of a misnomer. If it requires that a developer sign a contract and get Apple’s blessing just to get the development tools, it’s a lot more like 2nd party development. It would bring the iPhone and iPod Touch to feature parity with the iPod Classic and Nano, so I’m glad to see it, assuming it’s true (which I do).

figure 1: Spore, an example of a 2nd party game that could come to the iPhone

There’s no release date listed, so there’s no way to tell when it will be available. Safe guesses include after Leopard (more on that later this morning) and in January for Macworld 2008. Here’s the expected process of it all:

1. a partner of Apple thinks of an idea for an app. EA, for example, wants to write Spore.
2. EA submits it to Apple in a fancy proposal
3. Apple says “Okay, good idea” and gives EA permission and tools necessary to write Spore.
4. EA writes Spore
5. Apple digitally signs Spore and sells it on iTunes so it can’t be pirated
6. I buy Spore from iTunes or the iTunes Wi-Fi store and never leave the house again

In a nutshell, it’s more or less the same process that was used for earlier versions of iPods, except most of those games were done by Apple in-house. I gotta tell you, I’m sometimes half surprised that Apple doesn’t sell their own programs through iTunes, let alone 2nd party games and apps for the new iPod Touch and iPhone. I suppose that building that infrastructure takes more than 3 months, though; I’ll just have to be patient for it.

Apple’s consistently been providing us with inconsistent information as to whether the iPod Touch has Bluetooth installed or whether it doesn’t. We won’t know for sure until someone does a tear-apart and chip analysis of it, but the software for sure seems to indicate that it could, as referenced by the screenshot of an iPod Touch in diagnostic mode. Note also the awesomeness of the Cereal Number, ambient light sensor, and temperature sensor.

figure 1: the only reason I can think of to include Bluetooth for an iPod that isn’t a phone is for Stereo Bluetooth, or A2DP. That, or wireless syncing. Either would be fine really.

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