So I started this tradition in my adult life where I celebrate my birthday every year by purchasing a quasi-expensive item that resides on my mental wishlist. Sure, maybe its a silly tradition to some, but for me it is more like an annual graduation present, a sort of a “good job son; you’ve worked really hard this past year, and thus made it one year closer to your ultimate goals” in the form of an item that my scrupulousness would never permit me to purchase otherwise. Being the level 27 nerd that I am, these “presents” to myself have pretty much always been in the form of tech gadgets, this year being no exception, as I am now the proud owner of an iPhone.
Being that I adopted back in February—just after the fancy 16gb gen1’s release—I’ve been witness to a great deal of technological evolution, albeit in a fairly short time. After the first week, i had that “this could be better” impatience that we-the-ingenuitive get shortly after a brainstorm, and I jailbroke (a tiny hack that allows one access to the inner recesses of the iPhone) my phone, installing a ton of 3rd party apps just prior to a trip to Barcelona. These apps put a lot of the functionality I’d expected of my new pocket mac into motion, such as:
- being able to actually put documents of any nature onto the device without the typical iTunes rigmarole (seriously, that thing is going to BE osx at some point if it continues it’s trend of forcing users to become increasingly more reliant on integrating with it to use their files/gadgets).
- FTP access.
- reading, storing, and bookmarking PDFs.
- writing real text files.
- playing games (not crappy cell phone games, but emulation of the nes/snes/genesis/gameboy/etc childhood favorites that are still somehow desirable after all of this time. )
- and the usual osx ammenities like a dictionary, a translator, a conversion tool etc.
During our trip abroad, these new found features were invaluable, particularly in terms of communication and commerce when my American Standard/half-fluent/US Dollar programmed mind reared it’s ethnocentric head. Even after our return, I found these new abilities so infinitely useful that I couldn’t imagine the void that should be in their place.
Well, as it is often said “all good things must come to an end” (though I scarcely believe this statement to be applicable beyond instances such as these). With the release of the fancy new 3g iPhone came the release of the ultra buggy, lethargic instability known as the 2.0 firmware.
My initial reaction was “Ooooooh I can forsake my freedom for the ability to install applications… sike.” however, after a few weeks, I saw all of these sick apps surfacing and realized that a majority of the hackers I’d been patronizing had been captured by the machine, thus slowing the release of new apps outside of the official Apple app store (more iTunes-driven fun) to a near halt, and effectively killing off support for many of my current apps. With the first update of the 2.0 firmware came the fix of a TON of bugs, many of which were fixed by a subsequent update, after which I figured “what the hell, I can always rehack it,” and took the plunge (quick note: updating your firmware undoes the jailbreak that allows one access to everything under the iPhone’s hood, this disabling the installation of 3rd party apps, creating an adhoc network to use your phone’s Internet connection on your laptop, etc).
Exploring the plethora of new apps was super exciting for the first few weeks until I found myself getting really frustrated with the idea of having to pay for apps to give me back the same functionality I’d had for free (see? my scrupulousness in motion again) with no real guarantee of them actually working. This sentiment was only echoed by Apple pulling apps that permitted too much freedom (one called “Netshare” that eased creating the aforementioned adhoc network).
I was spurred to action at the realization that I’d only have dial-up internet access during a week long stay in Florida, and thus decided to rehack my phone in hopes of tethering my phone’s Internet connection to my laptop. Interestingly enough, Apple ensures to close up all known ways of jailbreaking your phone with each firmware release. Being that I’d just upgraded to the most recent firmware, our friendly neighborhood hackers hadn’t found a new way in yet. Some new jailbreaking method had surfaced which required one to basically restore the iPhone to a hacked firmware file. This doesn’t really sound like that big of a deal, but you’d be amazed at how rooted into this thing you become, and thus starting over again is quite the pain when it comes to setting up all of your preferences and email accounts and files etc. So whatever, it’ll be worth the trouble, right?
After the craziness involved in creating a hacked version of the firmware, booting into this special recovery mode, and then tricking iTunes(OSXI) into loading up the hacked firmware when restoring my phone, the whole thing came crashing down into a pile of embers with a massive error message. Awesome! I get to restore my phone for real now and have nothing to show for the slow tedious pain of setting everything up again. Rad rad rad, man that was fun.
Ironically enough, the day that I started this blog post on the fancy WordPress iPhone app (which works quite well, by the way) as I sat in the darkness of my hurricane-encased hotel room in Florida (yes, I typed this entire damn thing with my thumbs on a 3″ screen during a hurricane; how’s that for devotion?) there was another hack released for Windows. Now, you’d think that I’d have learned my lesson with this the first time, but hey, what the hell, I already restored my phone once this week…
So, I queued up the necessary components for download via our hotel’s snail-esque wireless connection (1kb/s, how “high-speed” is that?) and headed to bed. When I got back from Epcot the next evening, these files had finally finished downloading, and I got to work. The allure of this new method was that you didn’t have to restore the phone, which in theory should save a great deal of the headache of the previous endeavor. I booted into Windows via VMWare Fusion, set everything up, and did the deed… No dice, another awesome error message. Tried to download yet another version of the damn firmware to be hacked, which was another evening’s worth of downloading, only to be met with yet another error in the morning. Yep, there’s nothing like the smell of failure in the morning, particularly one that has been brewing for several days.
My frustration aside, it’s still easily the most convenient tool ever, other than a real computer of course; I just wish that Apple would open the door a little more, well okay a lot more, but you know…
All of that being said, here you go Apple, here is my official resignation… well, at least until a better tool surfaces..
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