So next to world’s most known word “ok“, pretty everyone should have heard about the iPhone/iPod Touch gadgets from Apple.
Now, usually those sexy bastards are “closed” towards 3rd party development, however avid hackers (used a known TIFF exploit…) found a way into the system.
Rapidly afterwards a developer toolchain was born and a huge amount of homebrew applications is flooding the devices with an internet aware installation program (has community repositories etc.) which could as well be mistaken to be written by Apple itself.
With a device you can run a full Apache-based LAMP system on (Apache+PHP are all ported already) and developing for this multi-touch baby really becomes interesting.
Even more surprising is the fact that you don’t just get some minimal homebrew but full blown ports of applications and software which uses almost all of the features of the devices, such as the OpenGL ES hardware acceleration, proper UIKit integration, the built in accelerometer, camera, audio capabilities and of course usage of the multi-touch gestures. It almost feels like February…
Those guys who stand out in such times usually are those pushing the device to their limit. One of them is certainly a guy who calls himself “zodttd” and was already active in the PSP homebrew scene before.
He accomplished porting a full blown Gameboy Advance (GBA) emulator to the Apple babies which runs in full screen, full speed and uses the multi-touch screen.
Recently he has shocked a bit with announcing that he has succeeded in porting a Playstation One (PSX) emulator and chances are good that it will also work pretty well on the devices.
I wonder what we might see once Apple released it’s official SDK in Febuary?
Steve Jobs: “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.”
“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,”
Jobs continues, “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.”
Just hoping for Apple that they won’t infect the process with some kind of software DRM like the whole Symbian Signing crap.
Ah, and note that I am actually not a fan of the iPhone (due to it’s limits) however small powerful and sexy “new tech” devices where you can run some compiled love on are just way too cool to be ignored…
With Google’s Android, the iPhone and a wide range of expected “iPhone-Clones” in the first two quarters of 2008, next year looks like an interesting fight in the mobile market.
