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First Third-party Native iPhone Application Released
An anonymous reader writes "A third-party native application for the iPhone is now available. Gizmodo discusses the real full-fledged iPhone application with a graphic user interface and its own icon in the iPhone home screen. It is not a Web 2.0 app but the real thing. What is it? Ironically enough, MobileTerminal, 'a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application.' The iPhone dev revolution has just started."
...thats *totally* what I wanted to to with my multimedia smartphone!
Terminal!
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Spare me. OpenMoko is an open platform that nobody cares about.
It does look cool, but without an Apple sized hype-machine and good support from cell phone companies and service providers I don't see it taking off.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Heretic! All shall bow before the iChurch...
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Assuming Apple doesn't take steps in a subsequent update to actively disable third party applications, this could provide a channel for showing (or not) that third party applications doesn't automatically mean disruption of the provider network. Hopefully the inaugural apps will play nice, creating pressure on Apple to release an SDK to make it more likely that subsequent apps also play nice, rather than start patching it closed like a console. Apple has to respond, but they could go either way.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
I think the best use of this app would be to 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp' when a telemarketer calls.
I recently saw an ad for an embedded game developer.... by apple. Requiring many years of experience etc yadda yadda yadda.
Here's the apple game dev ad.
This speaks legions to me, and it says Apple is not only going to turn the iPhone into a a cool smartphone, but they will also start selling games with it. IT has enough horsepower and screen real estate to take on the PSP..... and the DS, with the multi touch interface.
If it works and sells, Sony is going to shit big square bricks, Steve Ballmer is single handedly going to cause a world chair shortage, and Nintendo is going to be most challenged. Anything you can do with the DS, you can do with the iPhone.
Most, most interesting.
Nobody cares about the iPhone as a platform either.
With no official SDK who is going to make applications for it? Maybe a couple of geeks happy to mess with something that's not documented and for which there's absolutely zero support from the vendor, but nobody of much importance. They'll have exactly the same problem you say OpenMoko has: That very few people will ever hear that something can be installed into an iPhone, and fewer yet will install something.
Installing applications will probably not be just a matter of point and click on a standard phone either.
1 and 2 are ridiculous claims based off of this information, and I'm pretty sure they were already aware of #3 based off of the grumbling developers and blogs after WWDC.
You've almost certainly not set the application file within the Terminal.app bundle to be executable once it's been transferred. Just like FTP, iphoneinterface always sets permissions to rw-r--r--
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Your post is so original and insightful that I'm sure legions of people are now saying "Gee, I need to rethink my relationship to apple."
You have answered the age old quesiton: do you want to post to slashdot, or do you want to CHANGE THE WORLD??? Well, I think in this post you have clearly accomplished both.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Uh, like, did you not notice the iPhone has only 3 physical buttons and one control surface, whereas every other smartphone is littered with buttons? Did you not notice the relatively huge screen for such a pocketable device? Did you not notice the lack of a stylus? Did you not notice that the UI morphs to meet the needs of the current task? Did you not notice the use of gestures to control the device and the use of visual feedback? Did you not notice how the user interacts via a built-in accelerometer? Did you not notice the visual voice mail? Did you not notice the accurate rendering of web pages using the built-in browser, and the equally accurate rendering of HTML e-mail? Did you not notice how easy it is to pan and zoom?
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you were blind.
It's called HTML+CSS+JS.
I don't care for the iPhone, myself -- another closed proprietary system? I'll wait for OpenMoko.
But you kind of have to give them credit for one thing. If they had released an iPhone-only SDK, you'd see iPhone-only apps. By not releasing any SDK, and by releasing a real web browser for it, people are writing web apps designed for mobile devices. Which means they're not really tied to the iPhone.
I think that's kind of cool, actually.
Well, it's called MobileTerminal.app, and the iPhone runs a Darwin kernel. So, just guessing, but it would seem to be a mobile version of Terminal.app on normal OS X.
Meaning, it's "a console window for the iPhone's operating system", yes.
Which also means that if the iPhone had a serial port, you could talk to that with MobileTerminal. Or if you want SSH or Telnet, those clients will run in MobileTerminal.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I want a phone running OpenMoko so that I can do the following things:
1) automatically check unknown numbers against whocalled.us type telemarketer lists
2) log ALL calls - especially useful to see how many times ppl from 1) have called you if you set it up to show while ringing
3) *MY* ringtones - they don't sell Wagner, Scriabin, Schnittke or death metal on those services - not that I'd want to pay for music I already own.
4) ringback tones
5) advanced blacklisting functionality
6) the ability to have my phone turned on to use as a clock or whatever without it being on the network so no one can call me (think movie theater or orchestral concert hall here)
7) things I haven't thought of yet
Tell me again why this is a revolution? The iPhone is a pretty cool toy
No, the iPhone is a really functional device that sucks a lot less than so many other phones, and fans of dynamic symbolic UI finally have a device that doesn't wimp out in presenting us with a virtual interface. Plus the screen DPI is so high it actually makes reading really small text practical so the screen is much more usable than you would think only from looking at the size in specs.
Furthermore it's also a device with a huge amount of potential, in part from Apple but also in part from hacking. And as we have seen with the Apple TV and other devices, Apple devices are generally hackable and Apple doesn't push back the way Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft do.
I don't quite know if revolution is the right word either, but it sure is a breath of fresh air in a world that until now has been a fetid swamp.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That said, a terminal app on my iPhone? Are you kidding? Hell yes, I'll set it up. It's not so much that it gives me a command line interface, it's that it gives me access to the Unix system in my pocket. Again, if you don't value that and don't get it, it's _fine_, really, but that doesn't mean it's without value to those who understand the value of such a thing.
It's fantastic. For years, I've heard Mac fans (amongst others, sure) moan loudly about web standards. Browser independence. Railing against websites that discriminate against Safari. That are "best viewed in IE".
Now, there's the iPhone. And suddenly coding HTML and CSS to meet the needs of one device / browser combination is apparently A-ok, because it's their device. I see.
For me, it's a revolution just because it's the first product that has reached a critical mass point to make me less likely to use my laptop. I make my living from my laptop, and I'm kind of anchored to it, which affects my daily lifestyle. The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%. This changes my lifestyle dramatically. It's actually a bit traumatic (in a positive sense) and I haven't completely adjusted to it. I'm actually considering traveling more, taking more working vacations, taking up running... I don't know, it's like it has made *me* more portable without me having to discipline myself to be as such. The impact is difficult to measure.
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