Quote:The busy beavers of the #iphone IRC channel, whose collective efforts have built the first unauthorized iPhone GUI application (it displays "Hello World" and does nothing else), have released the source for the demo app, buildable with the community-built toolchain and UIKit. There's also a compiled binary version of the app being hosted here.

Those crazy dudes working around the clock to hack the iPhone open have gotten one step closer. Last night, it was posted on the iPhone dev wiki that a hacker named "Nightwatch" had compiled and launched a Hello World application, the first nonstandard application to run on the iPhone. He did this by using a project of his called the ARM/Mach-O Toolchain, which is "being refined and tested" and "should be released as soon as possible."

This does not mean, however, that the iPhone is completely broken open-- from what I understand (and I'm definitely not a hardcore hacker), each iPhone has its own special code to be cracked, and even if the code is entered, there's no guarantee that the next software update won't break everything again.

But running a user application-- any user application-- on the iPhone is definitely a huge step in the process, and it's the result of a lot of these guys working around the clock since iPhone's release. Good for them.