It turns out that the 1.1.3 jailbreak instructions from iPhone Atlas is pretty much the best 1.1.3 instructions I have seen around.

I’m finishing the final step of the jailbreak right now, after a bit of difficulty. It turns out the difficulty (as well as the problem I experienced earlier with Nate True’s method) wasn’t something I was doing wrong. It’s because *.nyud.net (Coral Cache) doesn’t work on the office network, and the iPhone haxorz, in an effort to save bandwidth, are hosting a few of the packages over there. The soft-update package from the other day didn’t show up because of this. The OpenSSH package today didn’t show up because of this, either. I ended up having to install the VT-100 terminal, then use a little sed magic and regular expressions to remove Coral Cache from the URLs. Things as slower, but things are now actually possible.

EDIT: It mostly worked, except the cellular service was dead. I had to follow these instructions then resync with iTunes to turn it back on again: http://guides.macrumors.com/Jailbreaking_and_updating_to_1.1.3#Post-jailbreaking_-_Restoring_your_phone_service_in_1.1.3

My first attempt at the iPhone 1.1.3 jailbreak: FAIL.

I previously installed 1.1.3 in preparation for the jailbreak. In the murmurings before the jailbreak was released, I had heard that you need the official 1.1.3 upgrade to get the correct baseband firmware for the cellular modem chip to work with the Google maps “locate me” feature. You then downgrade to 1.1.1, then upgrade to a jailbroken 1.1.3. In theory, it was pretty easy.

In practice, it was a bit more involved. First, I had to downgrade to 1.1.1. This can’t be done with the latest iTunes (7.6), so I had to use some switcharoo framework magic and get a very specific version of iPHUC to make everything play well. After some trial and error, I got 1.1.1 installed, but was unable to activate it through official channels. I then had to use some hackery to make the phone think it was activated. By “some hackery” I mean stuff like this:

Slide to make an emergency call, enter *#307# press call, now use the back button on the top of your screen to remove *#307#, now enter 0 , press call, press answer, press hold, press decline. And you get to the contact list. And thereafter every time you push the homebutton you just slide the “emergency call” slide, then enter 0 , press call, press hold, press decline.

I mean, what? From there, things were much easier and involved getting the 1.1.3 jailbreaker, running it, and waiting. It downloaded the official 1.1.3 firmware, patched it, and uploaded it to the phone. It then prompted me to launch Installer.app and run the “1.1.3 soft update.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t there. The FAQ said I needed to update the community sources, then refresh the source list, and it will magically show up. The FAQ is wrong.

Since this was pretty much a dead end, I rebooted to restore mode (power+home for 15 seconds, then release power, keeping home held down) and restored to 1.1.3.

I just hope that when Apple says they’ll open the SDK to all 3rd party developers, they really do mean it, without any gotchas, caveats, or technicalities.

Of the things announced by El Steveo, I have to say that I’m thrilled by the technology in general, but not terribly interested in owning much of it. My thoughts:

* MacBook Air: yep, it’s tiny. My laptop really serves as a portable desktop, so a super-thin slightly underpowered/underfeatured laptop just does not do it for me.
* Movie rentals: I couldn’t care less about the AppleTV integration (as I don’t have an HDTV and likely won’t have one for a long, long time), but may rent a movie or two on the Mini connected to the TV just to try things out. It has that faster-than-Netflix immediate gratification factor, but Netflix has a huge catalog whereas iTunes will have “over 1000 movies.”
* Time Capsule: I’m interested in the hacking potential (for example, buying the small one and upgrading the hard drive), but my current backup solution doesn’t need to change. Well, it sort of does, but that’s a topic for another post where I ask about and compare offsite/online backups.
* iPhone firmware: I’m skeptically excited about this. I’d really like to install and use it, but I really need to force myself to wait until the 3rd party landscape (both hacks and official) becomes a bit more clear. Webapps are great and all, but I rather enjoy MobileTwitteriffic, Stumbler, VNsea, iSolitaire, weDict, iRCm, and weDict. Many of those things are impossible to do over the web, or at least would be so slow as to discourage use.

Macworld is around the corner, and that always means new products will be announced and pundits are trying to predict them before they’re out, based on the tiny bit of information that has trickled out of Apple. Here are my predictions:

* The iPhone development kit. This is a no-brainer. I predict that this will be open to all developers, as they can’t NOT do this because every other smartphone (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Sidekick, the Nokia OS) is open enough to allow anyone to write apps. Select developers will be able to place their applications in the iTunes store, meaning there’s lots of exposure, easy monetization, and I’m going to say that these iTunes-partner-apps probably have more low-level access to the underlying OS. This will make them more powerful than other apps, and makes Apple happy because they have more oversight. Homebrew developer apps will be more limited and will have to be downloaded from developer websites. Because they will not be in the “walled garden” of iTunes, developers are left to figure out their own purchase methods and ways to attract attention.

* New iPhone firmware to support the development kit. We’ve seen a leaked version of firmware recently with nice faux-GPS support from Google Maps. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that that was incomplete firmware and that the official release will also tie in the Back-To-My-Mac, bringing the iPhone, Leopard, and .Mac all into the same party. You’ll be able to access your home machine from anywhere with a cellphone connection (if you bought Leopard and are subscribed to .Mac, of course.) The connection will be mostly read-only. It will leverage the built-in reader (that can read PDF, Word, Excel, and other documents) so that you can read them while out.

* Everyone has been talking about either a tablet PC (an iPhone on steroids) or a Flash-memory based (i.e. non-hard-drive) MacBook. There have been patents surfacing about a way to dock a notebook into/behind the screen of an iMac. I can’t see them making a pure tablet PC, as that’s useful to a very few number of people. The iPhone is great for consuming content, but the folks that want something larger also want to create content, and for that you need a decent keyboard. My initial thought is that we’ll get an ultra-thin convertible laptop/tablet with an iMac-like docking station for the optical drive, full keyboard, printer, and such. You can run it as a laptop, or you can flip the screen around and close it to be a tablet. I’m going to say that it’s NOT touch-screen and that the convertible mode is simply for docking (and perhaps eBook-like functionality with accompanying buttons.) If it does happen to be touch-screen, it won’t be multi-touch because the OS and iApps are not quite there yet, and I’m not sure that the multitouch screens in larger sizes are cost effective quite yet for consumer products.

* My next thought is that, no, that doesn’t quite feel entirely Apple-like. It’s a little too derivative. What I can see them doing is coming out with a new iMac in which you can remove the screen and carry it around the house. It’s a tablet, sort of, but in the same way an X Terminal was a PC back in the day. All of the smarts (CPU and memory), the hard drive, and everything else is back at the base station. The screen is a remote-control window into what the computer’s doing. Of course, it will have a touch-screen for basic data entry: buttons, scroll bars, an on-screen keyboard. It’ll talk over WiFi. It’ll have enough smarts in it to connect via WiFi to the internet (whether it’s in your house or at a coffee shop doing the Back-To-My-Mac thing) and connect to your base station. If it can’t connect to your base station PC for some reason (connection down or power out at home, for instance), it provides some limited applications on its own: web browsing, RSS, widgets, that kind of thing: enough to browse the web and get some work done with Google Apps. This ties together Leopard, its screen sharing, its Back-To-My-Mac, and the portability and convenience of having a couch surfing “laptop” to have at hand while watching TV (”What else was that guy in? I’ll look it up on IMDB”) or as morning blog reading over breakfast.

* On second thought, nahhh… neither of these two tablet-like products quite seem like something Apple would make. The first one seems a bit too dumb. The second limits what you can do by your bandwidth: you can browse the web and work with documents, but how great will the performance be when trying to play a video file?

So really, I can predict the things we KNOW will happen: iPhone apps and firmware. I have no idea about this whole tablet/laptop/whatever thing.

YEAY! The SCUMM VM has been ported to the iPhone so that you can now play all your favorite LucasArts games from days long past.

BOO! The click points for the commands and objects are so tiny as to be extremely difficult to use (bordering on unusable in some places.) Similarly, the “meta” commands (right click, ESC, F5) are all weird multitouch gestures that take a long time to get used to.

Yes, the following is an actual iPhone screenshot…

Using “Method B,” I downgraded my iPhone firmware from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 today. It was pretty painless, although I had to re-enter all of my email settings, WiFi settings, and speed-dials. That silly feature matrix from Wired pretty much sums up the reasons. The Wireless iTunes Store would have been pretty handy for listening to 30 second sound clips, when someone brings up a song in conversation (”oh yeah, I remember that song.”) Other than that, I probably would never use it. The ability to double-click the home button to bring up the iPod controls was slick, but superfluous. I missed having a fake-GPS, a WiFi Stumbler, a good dictionary/thesaurus/general-reference app, a shell terminal, and several games. It just wasn’t worth it to “upgrade” to 1.1.1.

I updated to iPhone firmware 1.1.1 yesterday. The upgrade went without a hitch–I did a full restore, rather than hope the update played well with the 3rd-party-app hacks. It went flawlessly. The wireless iTunes store is interesting, but does not have the main things I would be listening to (podcasts and audiobooks.) Live, streaming 30-second clips of everything in the store is nice. Of course, the iPhone now uses the same (…or at least, a similar) lockdown mode as the iPod Touch, meaning the iPhone hackers do not have a way of installing third-party apps any more. The Wired Gadget Blog sums up the situation quite well with the following feature matrix:

I’m sure many of you have seen this, but Apple’s head marketing guy says Apple is staying neutral on iPhone hacks. Apple doesn’t hate the fact that people are writing 3rd party apps for the phone, but they’re also not directly supporting it. They won’t make firmware updates specifically to break people’s native apps, but if APIs change or things otherwise break, that’s life in the world of reverse-engineered functionality. I think this is actually really great news. I can think of many other companies that would squash the 3rd party development on general principle.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Similar to what they did with Aperture rebates a while back, they’ll be doing the same thing with the iPhone. $100 ain’t too shabby.

Do any of you Unix-heads know if there is some network-equivalent of the “nice” command for limiting bandwidth under Linux and/or OS X? For instance, it might let me issue a command such as the following:

netnice wget http://someurl

Yes, I am aware that wget itself has some bandwidth-limiting options, but that’s beside the point. There are other commands that do not, plus it’s easier to remember one command than it is to look up all the right flags for every command and it would be nice to alter a speed after a program has been launched. Architecturally, I don’t really see how this could work without a proxy or nasty Linux-specific drivers and iptables hacks because there’s not much in the network stack that can be hooked for such a purpose. I can do some basic Quality-of-Service hacks in my fancy Layer-2 router, but they’re based on what jack you’re plugged into (i.e. granularity down to a specific machine, but not program-by-program-within-the-same-machine.) I have a feeling this is an impossible search. Searching for various combinations of the terms “Unix network nice command bandwidth QoS, etc.” does not yield anything useful.

Dear Internet:

Stop whining about the iPhone price drop. Yes, it dropped by $200 today, only 67 days after its initial release. Yes, that is $3/day. Yes, that is a rather quick price drop for any piece of popular new technology (the crappy technology that nobody wants is an entirely different matter…) But it’s no reason to complain. Any early adopter that’s been around a while knows that’s just the “early adopter tax” you pay for getting something shiny immediately after release. Deal.

kthxbyelolz,
-Brian