Hello World
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So you got a Raspberry Pi: now what?
When the Raspberry Pi was released earlier this year, the credit-card-sized Linux machine became an instant hit. The night it became available to order, both Premier Farnell/element14 and RS Components, the official distributors of the Pi project, exhibited the signs of a late '90s Slashdot effect: you could barely even get the two sites to load. Fast forward to today, and you can finally get your hands on one within three weeks. The Raspberry Pi is truly the Linux device of the year, if not the past decade. Follow past the break and we'll show you how to set yours up now that you've actually succeeded in snagging one.
Getting Ready for Mountain Lion: Dictation
Mountain Lion is about to debut one of my favorite features ever: Dictation. With built-in support for speech-to-text, OS X Mountain Lion allows you to talk instead of type in nearly every app on the system. You'll be able to access dictation using a simple keyboard shortcut, a double click on the Function (fn) key. And if your keyboard doesn't have one available, or if you prefer another choice, System Preferences allows you to customize that shortcut. Dictation will be integrated with many system features, including Contacts, so it will more accurately recognize your colleagues' names. You don't have to worry that "Victor Agreda" will transform into "Vic tore a gray dar". (Although, truth be told, I'm still struggling to make my iPhone 4S realize that "call Mike Rose's phone" isn't "call microphone", and it uses the same speech-and-contacts integration as Mountain Lion.) If you're using Mountain Lion on a Mac without a built-in microphone (like my 2009 Mac mini), you'll need to hook up one in order to use the dictation features. You can use headsets as well as stand-alone mics. Mountain Lion dictation follows the same rules as Siri. You can dictate punctuation and capitalization as you talk. For example, you can say "hello world exclamation point" and Mountain Lion will type "Hello world!" Other handy meta-items include new line, period, comma, and question mark. Dictation is smart. Say, "Twenty two dollars and 32 cents" and it's automatically transformed into "$22.32." It handles dates, too. Say, "Thursday July Fourth Seventeen Seventy Six at Three P M" and it types "Thursday, July 4, 1776 at 3 PM." You can even say "smiley" and "frowny face" to add emoticons, namely, :-) and :-(, which may or may not please you as the hyphen noses are not exactly standard. Once you start working with dictation, you'll find that it can solve a problem you didn't know you had. Unfortunately, Mountain Lion offers dictation and only dictation. You can't ask a virtual voice assistant to shoot off an email or send a message ... at least not yet! Dictation supports English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Nokia makes Qt port to Maemo 5 and N900 official (video)
Hey developers, Nokia's got a special treat for you today. It just announced the official port of the community-driven Qt for Maemo project. That means a common framework for writing native applications (and web apps and services thanks to Webkit integration) across Maemo 5 and future Maemo 6 releases, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. That's a broad reach in terms of devices (including the hotly anticipated N900) and marketshare and a smart move by Nokia in an era where devices are differentiated not by hardware and OS but by their ability to run apps and connect to web services. A "technology preview" release is available now and scheduled for final release (based on Qt 4.6) in Q1 of 2010. Click through for a wee taste.
Video: PSP Go hacked, says 'hello world!'
As you'd expect, as soon as the PSP Go hit the shelves the homebrew community came out in force, looking to see which of its fave hacks and exploits might have made the trip from the original PSP to its UMD-less brethren. And here we are, with two videos posted by YouTube member Freeplay offering us tantalizing proof that indeed, at least one has. Of course, the whole thing is pretty rudimentary, the result of exploiting a known bug in an existing PSP game (which this particular hacker is remaining tight-lipped about rather than see Sony patch the thing). Karl B., who helped us to this one, provides a caveat: "It's user-mode only, meaning no flash modification, no piracy, no advanced custom themes, no plug-ins -- none of that." All the same, it does our inner geek a sliver of hope, doesn't it? Videos after the break. [Via PSP Updates, Exophase]
WebOS homebrewers say 'Hello World!' to Palm Pre
It's begun. Although lacking a general release of the SDK, the first homebrew apps have emerged thanks to last night's leaked WebOS root image. The first application puts a stake in the ground by displaying a simple "hello world" on the screen. Unfortunately, the code overwrote the pre-installed Sprint Nascar application... oh wait, that's probably a good thing. Devs have also started tampering with existing code to disable the shutter sound on the camera while leaving the rest of the sounds enabled. Now why would somebody want to do that?Update: New image from an excited developer that shows scm6079's work over at PreCentral evolving with a 5-second photo timer and more. We're being told that several members of the Pre hacking team consist of old-school PalmOS hackers from the Samsung i300 days. Now if Palm can just lure back the rest of its developers smitten by Android and the lure of App Store riches then they might just make something of this fledgling smartphone platform.[Thanks, Scott M. and C.J.]
iPhone Dev 101: The "Hello World!" app
In the last iPhone Dev 101 post, I told you a little about creating your first project using Xcode; however, in this post, I want to show you how to create your first application that will run in the iPhone simulator. In honor of staying with the classic way of teaching programming, we'll create a "Hello World!" application as our first one. Creating the new projectIf you have installed the iPhone SDK/Xcode, then you can launch Xcode by navigating to /Developer/Applications. Once there, you can double click on the Xcode application (you may also find it handy to just drag the icon to the dock if you will be using it a lot). Once Xcode launches, click File > New Project. Under the iPhone OS section on the left side of the resulting window, select "Application." Select "View-based Application" from the templates that show up on the right side, and then click the "Choose" button. You will then be prompted to specify a project save name -- this will also be the name of your resulting application, so choose your project name wisely. You're project has now been created, and the Xcode window that is displayed will contain all of your code, resources, etc. There isn't much there now, but the application is fully functional at this point. You can click the "Build & Go" button in the toolbar, and the application will be compiled and launched in the iPhone Simulator. Again, this is a fully functional application, but it doesn't do anything useful at this point -- the usefulness of the app is up to your coding, but Apple supplies you with the base code and dependencies.
Rumor: DSi hacked, world surprised it took so long
"Hello? Yes, this is World. Hello? Hello? Why does nobody answer me?!"Just imagine how annoyed you would be if the planet's numerous hackers, modders and programmers sought to address you every time they wanted to prove the effectiveness of a piece of code. The "Hello World" proof of concept is customary, but oh so rude. People always leave poor World hanging after that.In any case, it would appear that the latest voice to join the choir of electronic greetings is Nintendo's newest portable wonder, the DSi. According to an unverified Youtube video, provided by one "Yasusoft" (developer of the YSMenu custom DSTT menu) and embedded after the break, the camera-equipped device has already fallen prey to software tinkering. Posters on GBATemp speculate that the hack sore used a modified TIFF image file to cause a buffer overflow. Well, obviously. We totally knew that. Didn't we, World? Hello?[Via GBATemp, DS Fanboy]
DSi already hacked, greets us with a lusty 'Hello World!'
We love those two magic words: "Hello World!" It's not even been a week since the DSi's Japanese launch and someone has hacked the handheld, stirring up all our homebrew dreams in the process. The coder in question has yet to release any specifics, but the touchscreen seems to be blank (you can make of that tidbit what you will). Exciting, yes? Still, until any other details emerge we're inclined to be a little skeptical. Just a little. In the meantime, be sure to catch the glorious video of the event after the break.
PS3 homebrew hack found, Hello World!
We haven't heard much out of the PS3 homebrew scene so far, which could be due to the console's delayed popularity, or perhaps because Sony did users a solid out of the gate and included Linux. That said, there's no stopping these hardcore homebrew types when they put their minds to something, and now Dragula96, a well known PSP hacker, has supposedly found an exploit on the PS3 that let him get a little Hello World proof of concept up and running. At the moment he's not saying how he did it, but he does say the hack is working on 60GB and 40GB PS3s, running the current 2.20 firmware. Next on the agenda? Pong. Video is after the break. [Thanks, Craig]
In which, iPhone apps are built
It turns out that creating new GUI iPhone apps is both harder and easier than you expect. Saturday night when the first iPhone UI app proof-of-concept appeared, I was tied up with family. I frantically emailed Mike Rose begging him to get a post out, which, wonderful man that he is, he did. Sunday, I grabbed what time I could, intent on testing out the new developer toolchain produced by Nightwatch and company. In summary: if you can wait for an already-compiled binary toolchain to emerge, do so. The developers have done all they can to make building the tools as simple a process as possible. The folks on the irc.osx86.hu #iphone-uikit channel are helpful and supportive. But the bottom line is pre-alpha means pre-alpha. There many rough compiling patches along the way where I ended up hitting my head against the wall, convinced I could never get the tools built. I had to edit the source several times to get it to compile on my Intel Mac Mini.
Binaries, source outed for first 3rd party iPhone app
It's still a little way off from meaning anything to the average user, but the enterprising folks over at iPhone Dev Wiki have finally turned out binaries and source code for their very first compiled iPhone app. Of course, all it does is spit out the ubiquitous programmer shout-out "Hello World," but make no mistake -- this is a huge step in getting usable, real-world apps into end users' hands without Apple's or AT&T's official blessing, and the fact that anyone can download this source and roll their own proof of concept is pretty darned comforting. "Hello World," indeed.[Via TUAW]
iPhone says "Hello World," here come the 3rd party apps
If there wasn't a vast, cold expanse of internet in the way, we could just hug those iPhone Dev Wiki folks. Apparently a particularly dedicated hacker who goes by "Nightwatch" has compiled and launched the iPhone's very first independent "Hello World" application, paving the way for 3rd party applications to run on the heretofore closed device. Of course, user implications are a long ways away, but Nightwatch has built a pre-alpha ARM/Mach-O Toolchain for other hackers to follow his example, and other folks should be able to get 3rd party code running on the iPhone before long. Exciting times indeed.[Thanks, Adam]
Cosplaying pirate reviews latest exploit in video podcast
Homebrew can be a little confusing and intimidating. So, I guess it's a little understandable when tons of confused people write comments in the blog, having absolutely no idea what the latest libtiff exploit does. Sure, they could've read the article, or even the helpful comments, but remember: I'm at your service. While I could explain again that the Hello World demo is just a demonstration of the potential of homebrew running on 2.0+ PSPs, I'll let this cosplaying pirate from PSP Hacking 101 explain it all. Arg, everybody likes pirates, matey!In other news, according to PSP Fanboy reader craig, a downgrader for 2.71 should be coming some time soon today or tomorrow. Check PSP Fanboy regularly to see the latest news![Via QJ]
Say hello to homebrew on 2.80 PSPs
Over the past few weeks, the homebrew community has been working hard on a new exploit in PSP firmware that would allow users of PSPs 2.0+ (including the recently released 2.80) run homebrew without Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. NOPx86, a team of coders, worked to take advantage of a flaw in libtiff. What that means is that the potential for homebrew is here: and it's easy as well. The team released a "Hello World" application as a proof of concept, and you can try it out yourself here. Just extract the image, place it in PSP's PHOTO directory, and then try to view the image. You'll see the homebrew message working, even on a 2.80 PSP!This is absolutely fantastic, especially because of how incredibly easy this is. Try it out, and who knows what kind of exciting new developments we'll see?[Thanks PSPFan]
