luminary blur

It’s something I vowed to never do. Wait. I vowed never to unlock my iPhone. I never vowed not to jailbreak it. Ok! Guilt trip over! In all honesty, I had very little interest in installing 3rd-party apps on my phone, mostly because of the complicated terminal hackery that seemed to be involved. This all changed with the release of AppSnapp. One click (err, touch) and I had the ability to install almost any 3rd-party app available. Sweet.

I go through the process after the jump along with some thoughts.

The first image was the top half of the AppSnapp installer page which, appropriately enough, installs Installer.app on your iPhone. It was almost too good to be true but it actually worked as advertised, and flawlessly I might add. Here’s the bottom half of the AppSnapp install page and the one link you have touch.

Touching the “Install AppSnapp” link was all it took. After a few minutes, I was presented with a “Slide to unlock…” screen and Installer.app magically appeared as my 14th icon. From there, all further installation is handled by Installer.app, including package listing, installation, and removal. For those familiar with Ubuntu, it’s very similar to the Synaptic Package Manager. Here’s the first screen you see after firing up Installer.app (which has updated itself several times since my initial installation Sunday night):

From there, the iPod touch-like interface is easy to navigate and understand. As of yet, I haven’t had to use the Update tab but I’m assuming that’s where I’ll be notified of any updates to apps I have already installed. Of course I’ve made use of the Uninstall feature which is just as seamless as installing. Sources is handy to access apps that aren’t an official part of the official AppTapp repository. There are other repositories available, including Conceited Software, Ste Packaging, and the cutting edge stuff can be found in the Conceited Software Beta section. Here’s some shots of various apps I’ve installed:

Top: NES emulator. Just had to install this one. Bottom: eBook reader. Not much out there right now besides public domain so I loaded up the Bible just to test it out.

Two IM programs are available. Top: Apollo is very slick and easy to use but only supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, and .Mac. As a Gtalk user, I was a little disappointed by this but according to Apollo’s project page, Gtalk support is on the way. Bottom: MobileChat is a little more basic than Apollo and features an interface more reminiscent of iChat (for better or worse). There is supposed to be Gtalk support here but it never worked for me. Also, MobileChat hasn’t been updated in several weeks so no one is really sure if it’s still alive or not.

Top: The Terminal. Proof that the iPhone really is running OS X just in case you didn’t believe it at this point. Bottom: VNSea which is a VNC viewer ported to the iPhone. Yes, that’s my Mac desktop being viewed and controlled by my fingers on my iPhone. It’s limited now but the potential is immense.

The customizable home screen is one of the most sought-after mods and here’s mine. I went with the standard SummerBoard Leopard theme, but there are a lot more available for download.

So far, I’ve been very happy with my jailbroken iPhone. There aren’t any “killer” apps for me just yet – the most impressive one is the NES emulator. It draws attention from onlookers but it’s extremely hard to control and somewhat jerky. Perhaps the most useful app I’ve installed is one of the simplest: SendPics, which allows you to send photos taken with the camera as well as screenshots at full resolution. Also interesting is the “Dock” program which puts that little glow in the bottom right corner. Touching that and dragging your finger out brings up a radial dock of sorts that lets you choose any application from any application, although the glow is missing when you’re in the iPod app.

Some other interesting things I’ve been able to do since the jailbreak:

• SSHing into my iPhone. Almost as cool as using the terminal on the iPhone.
• Mounting the iPhone in the Finder using MacFUSE and sshfs. Way cooler than navigating with the command line.
• Streaming the music on my iPhone over Wi-Fi to my Mac. Yes, it can be done thanks to Firefly Media Server. It uses Bonjour to make the music on the phone visible to iTunes. Very cool.
• MobileCast allows you to download podcasts over Wi-Fi or EDGE. It sounded cool at first but unfortunately it’s a self-contained app and doesn’t integrate with the iPod portion of the phone. If it could download the podcasts and then integrate them into the ones I’ve already synced via iTunes – now that would be useful. Before MobileCast.

That’s it for now. I’ll post about iPhone jailbreaking again if I find that “killer” app. Or if Apollo actually gets around to adding Gtalk support. Or, whenever I feel like it.

written by Ben