Nightwatch
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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.
Hello World, says iPhone
Those crazy dudes working around the clock to hack the iPhone open have gotten one step closer. Last night, it was posted on the iPhone dev wiki that a hacker named "Nightwatch" had compiled and launched a Hello World application, the first nonstandard application to run on the iPhone. He did this by using a project of his called the ARM/Mach-O Toolchain, which is "being refined and tested" and "should be released as soon as possible."This does not mean, however, that the iPhone is completely broken open-- from what I understand (and I'm definitely not a hardcore hacker), each iPhone has its own special code to be cracked, and even if the code is entered, there's no guarantee that the next software update won't break everything again.But running a user application-- any user application-- on the iPhone is definitely a huge step in the process, and it's the result of a lot of these guys working around the clock since iPhone's release. Good for them.Thanks, Mike D!
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]
