grep.ro

The iPod touch. iPhone without the telephone, designed for listening to music, watching videos, and doing internet-ish things like surfing the web and reading e-mail. But it's also a full-blown computer, running a real Unix operating system. I was interested in the computer part.

So I ponied up the cash and got me a shiny new 8GB 2nd generation iPod touch. Of course, it was exquisitely packaged, but I'm sure the Internet has plenty of photos describing that. Of course, I was awe-struck by the user interface, but I already knew it was awesome. What I didn't know was that my shiny new iPod was not jailbreakable, and the whole point of me buying an iPod was to jailbreak it.

I did a bit of research, followed the DevTeam's blog, and waited anxiously for a hack. The new 2nd generation iPod hardware had extra anti-hack stuff inside, so it was harder to jailbreak, and they finally released a partial hack (that required manually patching the firmware on every reboot) about a week ago. It took me a few hours of tinkering, but in the end I had a shiny, new, jailbroken iPod. Cue sound of crowd going wild.

Now it was time to play. The jailbreaking community is surprisingly large; there are several software repositories with apt packages that range from openssh to silly games to browser patches that add extra functionality. There's an excellent Terminal application that makes good use of the hardware's limited screen and lack of keyboard; there's even Vim and Git, working out of the box! So when you ssh into the iPod, it feels like a remote Linux box with all its Unix goodness. I'm still tweaking it; for example, Vim is not displaying non-ascii characters, and that's a real problem for me.

I'm hopelessly dependent on my Melody-based organizer system (truth be told, it's mostly a bunch of text files that I edit by hand right now, but I got big plans for this baby) that is synched with git across several computers; the iPod is now one of them. I plan on building a graphical interface to help with some of the more common things I do, like taking random notes, synching, or viewing/reorganizing the day's todo list. And because the iPod already has an excellent built-in web browser, and so do my other computers, all I need to do is write a web-based application.

It's a real shame Apple has chosen to keep the iPhone/iPod touch software locked down. I partly understand their reasoning, but I don't agree with it. Those who really care will jailbreak their devices, but for how long? The DevTeam folks say that Apple is building up the jailbreaking protection with every iteration of their software and hardware; one wonders if, a year or two from now, new iPods and iPhones will be hackable at all. Hopefully the Andriod will be a better platform by then.