Jason Madigan

1.1.4 is out and there doesn’t seem to be anything major - final prep work before the SDK lands I imagine. Safari now seems to have support for plugins (things are slowly falling into place for Flash). Oh and for the first time in ages the jailbreak method used has not been patched by Apple - so ZiPhone will continue to work just fine.

Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at a little iPhone development. My Objective-C skill is non-existant, and my C skill is incredibly rusty - but I pressed on. First up was installation of the toolchain required to compile native applications. This one was tough, very tough. After much swearing and shouting, I finally managed to get it to install. The iPhone dev team’s official instructions were of help right up until

sed 's/^FLAGS_FOR_TARGET=$/FLAGS_FOR_TARGET=${FLAGS_FOR_TARGET-}/g' \

This is where things seemed to go horribly wrong for me and others. After scouring google for solutions for what seemed like hours, I finally happened up on this little golden nugget. With the toolchain finally installed I cracked open my copy of Stephen Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C along with iPhone Open Application Development - a book by NES.app’s developer which I really can’t recommend at the moment.

I decided to write a useless little ROT13 app which you can grab by adding http://www.jasonmadigan.com/repo.xml to your installer.app’s repository list. I’ll release the source tomorrow after a quick cleanup.

Finally. Restoring an iPhone is no longer quite so painful. No more jumping through hoops downgrading to 1.1.1 and slowly clawing your way back up to 1.1.3 with all manner of retarded soft updates. Thanks to Zibree’s ZiPhone, you no longer need to beg and plead with your iPhone to play along with you for two hours to get your iPhone back in working order. Unlocking, activating & jailbreaking any iPhone is now incredibly simple fast.

Somebody really had to do this - when 1.1.4 lands (and it will soon), restoring an iPhone would have previously meant no less than 4 jailbreak hoops to jump through.

Mister George Hotz has come through for us once again, with a software based unlock for out of the box 1.1.2 & 1.1.3 iPhones. Now would be a good time to buy one. It uses a delightful IPSF based method but this one doesn’t zero out your seczones. So should Apple lose their minds in the future and include a bootloader update in a future software release you won’t end up with a complete brick.

Hot on it’s heals was a brief update regarding retarded dev-team/elite team babby drama. It seems Zibri got tired of the two dev teams’ shenanigans once more and decided to jump the gun and release the method used by an upcoming semi-hardware unlock (an exploit piggybacking on a Turbo SIM, once run there’s no need for the Turbo SIM anymore), the details of which have been known by the dev-team for several weeks now.

Interesting times. Of course this means I’m going to be bombarded with a stream of requests for unlocking - all of which I’m going to politely decline. The iPhone is great and all, but eventually you come to realise that, with every new firmware release, the time it’ll take you to restore should something terrible happen is going to increase considerably. I don’t know about you guys, but as soon as an official release is confirmed for here with 3G, I’m jumping ship. It’s just too tiring.