After a month of waiting, with no contact from Apple save form letters that went out to all developers, we’d grown quite frustrated. We don’t know if we should invest our time in a platform for which we may not even be allowed to release software. Finally on April 8th, one of our developers decided to apply to the program as an individual, to see what would happen. Shockingly, in under 24 hours he had a certificate which enabled him to work on actual hardware.
Kafasis thinks that Apple is handling individual applications separately from — and for some reason much faster than — company applications, which he finds confusing given the possible impact of large development houses and the only real (and critical) differentiator of the $99 program acceptance being the ability to tether and test actual hardware (rather than simulators) and, of course, the ability to sell through the App Store. Ultimately, he believes the problem lies in Apple’s communications — not only its lack of clarity, but its complete lacking (almost a trademark of the tight lipped company).
iPhone dev expert extraordinaire Erica Sadun follows up with some analysis of her own:
25000 applied; 4000 admitted. By any stretch of the calculator, thats only about a 16% acceptance rate. It’s one that has left many independent OS X developers behind.
Was Apple overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications? Have they botched the program from the get go? And what could they do now to help get developers (and their developments) back on track?
The fifth beta version of the iPhone SDK is now available. Log in to the iPhone Dev Center and take advantage of all the development resources available to you—a new version of the iPhone SDK, updated documentation, the latest release notes, and more.
No word yet on what secrets deep delving this latest code may reveal, but if past discoveries are any indication, literally anything is possible (except for cut and paste, of course).
Avast ye scurvy 2.0 firmware — prepare to be pwned! Erica Sadun of TUAW tells us the cartoon Jobs’ing, Russian slang’ing, custom firmware making, iTunes loading unlock solution has hit version 1.1:
The new tool allows you to add custom packages, logos and fixes EDGE settings under 1.1.4. Either pop over to iPhone-dev.org or choose PwnageTool > Check for Updates (Command-U) directly from the app.
But don’t raise the Jolly Roger too soon, rumors are also circulating that Cap’n Jobs is coming about hard, cannon’s loaded, and may just be upping the ante soon in the great unloack cat’n'mouse game.
Will Apple be able to hang the rascally pirates from the highest yard arm? Are the pirates too far ahead at this point? And how ironic is it that Jobs and co. once styled themselves as the pirates? What do you think?
After waking up on Tuesday to face the dreaded Blue– er… Pink-Screen-of-Death (?!) that signaled the expiry of the 2nd beta release for the iPhone SDK, would-be-developers managed not to go to bed angry as Apple kissed and made-up in the form of SDK Beta 3.
Erica Sadun over on TUAW reports that the latest/greatest weighs in at 1.4GB, or just three-quarters the size of the original beta, with the matching firmware at under 200MB according to a commenter.
What new goodies does this release hold? We’ll have to wait a bit to find out. But with the continual slow, grinding, excruciating march towards an anticipated June release (WWDC? June 30 at 11:59 pm? Little help?) waiting is something iPhone lovers are used to.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is running some screen shots of what may well be our first glimpse of the iPhone’s App Store.
Pretty much what you’d expect if you combined the Wi-Fi Music Store with apps, the shots came TUAW’s way via a tipster. Seems said tipster claims that, after repeatedly stabbing away at the App Store button (does that mean he was running the SDK beta??) and failing to connect, lo and behold he got through.
UPDATE: iPhone l33t hax0r Erica Sadun went poking around the storeBag.xml from Apple’s public iTunes server and found the following:
There appears to be a new service, labeled “p2-panda” [note: p2 might stand for "purple", the iPhone code name] that offers access to the same functionality that Cory reported on last night. Specifically, the panda calls include StoreFront listings, Genres, Top Fifty listings, and Updates. If nothing else, this independently confirms functionality seen from those screen shots.
Erica Sadun has done it again, creating a great app for the iPhone called “findme.” What it does is constantly track your iPhone’s location and sends it via SMS to Twitter. The idea is that if your iPhone is stolen or you want to enable your stalkers to keep track of you constantly, you can set this up and you’ll automatically have a private Twitter page that shows the iPhone’s approximate longitude and latitude.
It takes a bit of know-how to get it running (it’s command line. If “curl” and “daemon” mean nothing do you, you might want to move along). If nothing else, it shows that I wasn’t kidding when I said yesterday that developers will always find a way to do cool stuff with native apps.
A couple of great iPhone apps (for Jailbroken iPhones) came out in the past couple of days. The first is AppFlow, which lets you browse your applications (but not your Web Links, they’re a little different) via the sweet coverflow interface. – ericasadun.com » Introducing AppFlow [via tuaw]
The next one is Touchpad, which turns the iPhone into a trackpad for your computer. It’s a neat idea, though the only use I can think of is if you have a laptop with a “nub” mouse that you want to replace from time to time. If nothing else, though, it shows the power of the iPhone:
Cool apps like these are coming out all the time on the sly now, I can’t imagine what it will be like once this stuff can be official. There are, what, 7 days left in February? Apple: time to step up and either deliver or tell us it’s delayed.
Full support for Tasks/ToDos is a basic feature and one that may be holding back many business users from fully embracing the iPhone. Here’s to hoping that we’ll see a 1.2 update very soon with full support not only for native apps, but a brand new ToDo app as well. Viva la February!
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 hasn’t been a lot of noteworthy progress on opening up 1.1.1 like there was on version 1.0 of the firmware, and that’s to be expected. However, there were some valiant pushes forward last week, by prominent iPhone hacker Erica Sadun who mapped out the filesystem of the 1.1.1 update. This is notable as it pre-empts the requirement to decrypt the filesystem before inspecting files and whatnot.
The other notable incidence is a TIFF image buffer overflow, which essentially means that interesting things could be launched on an iPhone by viewing a malformed image in Safari. It’s within the realm of possibility that a custom-crafted TIFF picture could, for example, install a running copy of ssh on an iPhone. Or download and install a ringtone. Or any other payload a creative hacker could stuff in there, really. It’s altogether possible that the next wave of users hacking their iPhone’s software could be through browsing to a web page and viewing large malformed TIFF files in a particular order.
My guess is that it’s safe to say that it will still probably be at least a week or two before it’s possible for your average user to hack the new firmware; there’s no guarantee that either method will bear fruit. The malformed TIFF will likely require a less-straightforward heap overflow, as the stack on the iPhone is set to no-execute. To rephrase that last sentence in English, it will probably take the hackers a while to get the corrupt TIFF image with code inside to do exactly what they want it to do.
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