Finally, my little app running on my iPod Touch!

I didn't realize that the iPhone OS3 introduced new complexity on using XCode 3 to write iphone app. No wonder I tried and tried and couldn't get it running when using the older hack. However, the newer hack works like a charm. So now I can focus on actually learning how to write the iPhone app. Sweet.

By the way, I may also need to buy another keyboard, since resting my palms on my Lenovo X60T, which is my iPhone development machine, is kind of a painful experience consider how long I have to keep the machine running and how hot the keyboard can get. Yeah, I know, my excuse of buying more stuff.

iPhone SDK 3.0 installed

Here's the good news, and then the not so good news.

The good news is that iPhone SDK 3.0 was successfully installed. The not so good news is that I still haven't got the code compiled. However, this site shatter some light, so maybe I can find a way to by pass the provision profile thing. We'll see.

Running iPhone SDK 3.0 WITHOUT OSX 10.5.7 ??

I was kind of desperate trying to upgrade my stable OSX 10.5.6 on my Lenovo X60T to 10.5.7 just so that I can use iPhone SDK 3.0. I tried the upgrade, but I got a blank blue screen after boot up with "-v" (I didn't try -v -f though).

I was almost gave up until I suddenly thought of something: maybe iPhone SDK 3.0 DOES WORK on 10.5.6 or lower. After I googled a bit I found this post with a neat trick. Basically you hack the system by changing the version number to 10.5.7 by accessing this file (use Text Wangler )

/System/Library/Coreservices/Systemversion.plist

Inside it, I changed to version number from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 .

Since I found out that my version of iPhone SDK has some problem (hell knows why :-< ), so I am still waiting for to download to complete, and then I'll give the installation a try.

Finally something forced me to upgrade to OSX 10.5.7

I took a whole night, and still couldn't get my home grown iPhone application running on my iPod Touch yet. At first I was stuck at generating the certificate. Then I was stuck at figuring out the hardware device profile. And finally, I realized that I have to upgrade my MacOSX to 10.5.7 in order to install the iPhone SDK 3.0 (so that I can use my iPhone SDK3 device to test application).

And before I install 10.5.7, i wanted to play it safe so I am freeing up space on my harddisk in order to create a OS parition backup.

And the journey continues.

Install .ipa on iPod Touch WITHOUT using iTune

I was surprised that using direct cable connection take quite some time to transfer .ipa file from my laptop to my iPod Touch. A 10Mb .ipa took a few minutes, while the 359Mb file took almost 10+ minutes! But at least the whole process is GUI based, and I can finish all of them while I am working on some other stuffs.

Here's the break down on what I did:

- Make sure Cydia has Hackulo.us channel (URL) setup
- Download and install the Installous iPhone app using Cydia
- Put your ipa under /var/mobile/Library/Downloads folder (using iPhoneBrowser)
- On iPhone, go to Installous application
- Click Downloads tab, you should see the .ipa item there.
- Just click and install it.

Some tidbit

- I think it's a good idea to turn on the "delete after install" feature in Installous because takes 10 minutes to delete the 400Mb .ipa (since iPhoneBrower automatically does backup when you delete stuff)

- It took a LOT of time to decompress big achieve (like ... a 400Mb achieve. In fact, I thought the connection was iPod was hanged.) But eventually it works out.

My process of jailbreaking iPod Touch 2nd Generation

Contrary to what most others said, putting .ipa application I compiled using XCode into my iPod Touch is not as straight forward as I expected. In fact, as of now, I only successfully accomplish putting .ipa on my iPod Touch last night, and I already spent 3 hours trying to do that, mostly spent on trying to figure out how it worked.

The jailbreaking part was actually relatively straight forward. I did have problem doing that on my Eee PC 900, but it was fine with my lenovo X60. The next step would be putting .ipa in my iPod. I tried the scheme of putting the .ipa directory under the .../Downloads folder in iPod Touch using iPhoneBrowser (a Windows application that I downloaded from GoogleGear), but couldn't find the iPhone application to load this file that I put in iPod Touch.

Eventaully i did this:

- In Cydia, I added the Hackulo.us channel
- After then I added the AppSync for OS 3.0 application for iPhone

And that's all. Now I can directly load the .ipa into my iPod Touch by double click on the .ipa file on my PC, let it bring up iTune, and then use iTune to sync the application to my iPod Touch.

Jailbroken

Finally I jailbroken my iPod Touch. I had problem doing that with my EeePC 900, but doing it on my Lenovo X60T was a piece of cake. Now I need to fulfill my promise by developing an app on my Hackintosh in order to justify my jailbreaking.

My mess when dealing with 2 iPods and 2 iTunes

I was a bitch shocked to find out that I couldn't simply copy my iTune database (living in my removable 320Gb harddisk) to either the removable harddisk (Z: on EeePC) or the D: Drive on my EeePC, and let it sync my iPod Touch with all the lastest Podcast and apps I downloaded at work.

The problem was not on the podcasts, but mainly on the apps. Futher investigation found out a few interesting stuff:

• While other items like podcast, music and audiobook remember items using relatively path, the APPS in iTune actually remember content using absolute path

After all my apps got wipped out, I had to rebuild them again. And then, I found out the best way to sync app and podcast on my EeePC:

• Create a folder in Z: and called it M
• Map m: drive to Z:\M using subst. I use M: because on my removable 320Gb harddisk, my iTune folder is in M:\
• Copy the whole iTune folder to the Z:\M folder
• Now the M: drive on 320Gb harddisk should have the same iTune folder and same path as in the virtual M: drive .
• Sync with iPod Touch.

It's not as straight forward as I wish it could be, but at least I did what I need to do.