Posts tagged: APPLE

Hacking the iPhone! Perfect reddit/slashdot/digg material. Except that the site’s owners have requested that the link be kept off of those services, for fear of being overrun with traffic.

Update: I misread their request – it covers puny blogs too. Which makes this post a lot less exciting. So all I can suggest at the moment is checking out the hackers’ IRC channel (#iphone on irc.osx86.hu) or doing some googling.

I love how this effort has taken off. It seems futile now for companies like Apple to release a microprocessor-based product with no developer kit. People will always want to get under the covers, and they’ll clearly do it with or without you.

Perhaps ironically, one of the great technological advances of OS X over previous versions is the availability of a command line. Someday we won’t need this, but today it turns out that the pure point-n-click GUI was something of a premature optimization, and that in fact certain types of users find they work faster and better when typing commands.

While its simplicity is part of its charm, terminal applications invite tweaking. One of the earliest celebrated novelties of OS X was Terminal.app’s option for translucent windows. I initially thought this was useless, but have come to really appreciate it. With the right opacity setting, you hardly notice the background, yet when you refocus your attention you can see it easily. It’s like having on-demand X-ray vision!

Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the disputed “iPhone” trademark, and – surprise – Apple gets to keep using it. From the Cisco press release:

Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world.

To further differentiate brands, the Apple iPhone will also be known as “the real iPhone”, with the Cisco model being referred to as “Oh, I thought you meant the other one.”

It a rather astounding open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” posted to the Apple website today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple “would embrace… wholeheartedly” a music marketplace free of of Digital Rights Management schemes.

The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

A recent discussion on the Well came around to the question of whether the classic Macintosh was “hacker’s” machine or not. Conventional wisdom would say no – it was the very definition of buttoned up. You couldn’t even develop software for it without a separate, more expensive computer (the Lisa) in the early days.

But I think there’s a counter-argument to be made. Yes, the old Mac was a closed box that didn’t allow access to the internals of the OS. However, it was a far more tweakable system for most Mac users than the fragile, inscrutable Windows of that era was for most Windows users.