You can download the slides and program examples here.

To get started with open source iPhone development, you can download the open source toolchain for Linux or for Windows/Cygwin.

Note: To use the toolchain, you need to obtain the iPhone OS headers, frameworks and libraries. You can jailbreak your device and extract the frameworks and libraries using SSH, or you can decrypt the firmware and extract the framework and libraries from the decrypted disk image. The binaries you need are /System/Library/Frameworks and /usr/lib .

You can download the headers from the iPhone-dev team’s Subversion repository with svn co http://iphone-dev.googlecode.com/svn/branches/include-1.2-sdk

To use the iPhone-dev team’s headers, you need headers for Mac OS X 10.4 SDK. Then you type this at the command line:

cd /path/to/iphone-dev/svn/branches/include-1.2-sdk
./configure --with-macosx-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk

sudo bash install-headers.sh


Or you can extract them from the official iPhone SDK.

Once you get the binaries and headers, move them to /usr/local/iphone-sysroot/ . The headers go in /usr/local/iphone-sysroot/usr/include/ , frameworks go in /usr/local/iphone-sysroot/System/Library/Frameworks/ , and libraries in /usr/local/iphone-sysroot/usr/lib/ .

Then to compile and link, set CFLAGS and LDFLAGS like below :

export CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/lib/gcc/arm-apple-darwin9/4.2.1/include \
-isysroot /usr/local/iphone-sysroot

export LDFLAGS=-framework CoreFoundation -framework Foundation \
-framework UIKit -lobjc -bind_at_load -isysroot /usr/local/iphone-sysroot


Then use these compile and linker commands :

/usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin9-gcc -c $(CFLAGS) main.c HelloWorld.m

/usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin9-gcc $(LDFLAGS) HelloWorld.o main.o \
-o HelloWorld


The easiest way to set this up for each project is in a makefile. Look in the HelloWorld example in the zip file with the slides for an example.

In other news, I have been geeking out with both the iPhone SDK and the Android SDK, and I believe I have a little something special going here. I hope to have it ready for release, on both platforms, sometime in January. Development continues.

I will need beta testers soon. Any T-Mobile G1 users interested in helping out, you can email me at dreadpiratepj [at] gmail [dot] com

Speaking of Android, I started playing with it now that the source code to the whole thing has been released. I managed to get Android booting on a Palm TX, but it still needs a lot of work. It boots, but it doesn’t do crap once it boots.

I get all the way to the “Press the MENU key to unlock” screen, but none of the keys do anything. Neither does touching the screen. It’s an issue with the Linux kernel drivers and device configuration. It just wasn’t made to run on a Palm TX without proper tweaking of the source. I just don’t know what the proper tweaking is.

I need to look in my bag of loot for a Palm serial cable (I’m sure I have one somewhere) and hopefully I can get a serial console from which to poke around inside Android.

I do have Android running successfully on my Sprint Touch (my parents, my sister and I have a family plan on Sprint.) Credit for that goes to Dr. Martin Johnson in New Zeland. I just use his release on my phone (before you ask, no, his release doesn’t work on the Palm TX. It’s the first thing I tried.

There were a couple of guys from the Philadelphia suburbs right next to us. Some guy from Dallas, TX was two rows ahead of us, and was stranded in PR because of the American Airlines fiasco.

The concert was awesome, three hours of great live music. Truly the best live performance I’ve seen in ages. There was a six minute drum solo by Neil Peart, that was just amazing.

I took my iPhone to use as a camera, knowing digital cameras per se were not allowed. I used an iPhone application called Snapture. This great little app is made for “jailbroken” iPhones. That is, iPhones that have been modified to load and run applications not “blessed” by Apple.

You’ll notice that some pictures are blurry/shakey, followed by two steady, clear ones. Snapture has an optional feature where it takes three pictures within a second or so of each other. This helps you steady the phone and get at least one clear shot.

I took 1426 photos. Yeah, that’s right, 1426 photos. I did this by using the 3-consecutive-shots feature of Snapture, pushing the volume button to trigger the photo capture twice per minute or so.

Set 1 of photos is here.

Set 2 of photos is here.

Each ZIP file contains 713 photos and is less than 260MB.

The pictures I’m uploading are totally unprocessed. They’re right off of the iPhone at 1600×1200 resolution.

I started deleting blurry pictures, and pictures where the stage was too dark or too bright and lacking contrast. But there are so many pictures to go through, I eventually decided not to bother.

The last 250+ pictures are in black and white. I think my finger slipped at some point, and I touched one of Snapture’s on-screen controls. Sorry about that!