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iPhone Open Application Development
book

iPhone Open Application Development

by Jonathan Zdziarski
March 2008
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
6h 21m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from iPhone Open Application Development

Chapter 1. Breaking Into and Setting Up the iPhone

The iPhone is a closed device. We can't say this enough. Up to and including version 1.1.x of the iPhone software, users have been locked out of the operating system. This doesn't seem to stop a majority of iPhone users, but does make it more difficult to get started. Before hacking of any kind can take place, however, the iPhone must be broken free from its jail—literally.

The iPhone runs in a chrooted environment, where no user or desktop application—even iTunes—can see into the operating system; this is commonly known in the Unix world as a chroot jail. This jail (and the fact that you can't simply yank out the hard drive) is the only thing standing in the way of the iPhone functioning as a complete, portable Mac OS X computer. Fortunately, many free tools have been written to make the jailbreaking process simple.

In this chapter, you'll stage your iPhone for software development. This includes breaking free from the chroot jail (called jailbreaking) so you can access the filesystem. You'll also install a BSD Unix world, which is a set of common Unix binaries such as ls and cp. This allows you to navigate and manage the iPhone's operating system, which is believed to be a version of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for the arm processor. Finally, you'll get a secure login command environment, SSH, up and running. This is useful for copying files to and from your iPhone, and we'll use it to install applications and run examples.

Jailbreak ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596518554Errata Page