First Third-party Native iPhone Application Released

An anonymous reader writes "A third-party native application for the iPhone is now available. Gizmodo discusses the real full-fledged iPhone application with a graphic user interface and its own icon in the iPhone home screen. It is not a Web 2.0 app but the real thing. What is it? Ironically enough, MobileTerminal, 'a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application.' The iPhone dev revolution has just started."

SWEET!

...thats *totally* what I wanted to to with my multimedia smartphone!
Terminal!

Re:SWEET!

There are lots of neat things that you could do from the terminal on a multimedia smartphone.

You can use it to pipe text messages to festival. Then it's like you're actually talking to the other person!

Re:SWEET!

At last, the iPhone has a decent interface!

Re:SWEET!

It's beyond me how someone would switch carriers without trying out the service first. A $20 prepaid phone from RadioShack or similar comes with like $10 worth of airtime. Carry it around your normal places for a week. Try it first. It's really your own fault if you lost that kind of money because you aren't in a good enough service area - it's just not that hard to figure out before signing a 2-year contract, ESPECIALLY on a phone with a restocking fee.

Re:SWEET!

plus all cell phone providers are showing off their new 14 day try for free policy that the government mandated upon them a year or so ago.

oh you didn't know??

Revolution?

Tell me again why this is a revolution? The iPhone is a pretty cool toy, but remind me what's revolutionary about it? Folks, Apple is a company that makes neat products. It's not a club or a religion.

Re:Revolution?

Heretic! All shall bow before the iChurch...

Re:Revolution?

Your post is so original and insightful that I'm sure legions of people are now saying "Gee, I need to rethink my relationship to apple."

You have answered the age old quesiton: do you want to post to slashdot, or do you want to CHANGE THE WORLD??? Well, I think in this post you have clearly accomplished both.

Re:Revolution?

Uh, like, did you not notice the iPhone has only 3 physical buttons and one control surface, whereas every other smartphone is littered with buttons? Did you not notice the relatively huge screen for such a pocketable device? Did you not notice the lack of a stylus? Did you not notice that the UI morphs to meet the needs of the current task? Did you not notice the use of gestures to control the device and the use of visual feedback? Did you not notice how the user interacts via a built-in accelerometer? Did you not notice the visual voice mail? Did you not notice the accurate rendering of web pages using the built-in browser, and the equally accurate rendering of HTML e-mail? Did you not notice how easy it is to pan and zoom?

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you were blind.

Functional

Tell me again why this is a revolution? The iPhone is a pretty cool toy

No, the iPhone is a really functional device that sucks a lot less than so many other phones, and fans of dynamic symbolic UI finally have a device that doesn't wimp out in presenting us with a virtual interface. Plus the screen DPI is so high it actually makes reading really small text practical so the screen is much more usable than you would think only from looking at the size in specs.

Furthermore it's also a device with a huge amount of potential, in part from Apple but also in part from hacking. And as we have seen with the Apple TV and other devices, Apple devices are generally hackable and Apple doesn't push back the way Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft do.

I don't quite know if revolution is the right word either, but it sure is a breath of fresh air in a world that until now has been a fetid swamp.

Re:Revolution?

Tell me again why this is a revolution? The iPhone is a pretty cool toy, but remind me what's revolutionary about it? Folks, Apple is a company that makes neat products. It's not a club or a religion.

Well for starters, you're doing that whole "pretend to be speaking for the opposition" thing which, sorry, you're not. It's a great device that does everything it does very well. Yes, I could do pretty much everything this thing does with my Treo but, the iPhone does it all with a more logical, consistent GUI, well thought out process flow, and all sorts of other things that people who merely tick off a features list will miss the value of. It's the same old story - people who want a car to get from home to work won't understand why (insert brand name here) is a nicer car, while those who have said car value the differences that the other person does not.

That said, a terminal app on my iPhone? Are you kidding? Hell yes, I'll set it up. It's not so much that it gives me a command line interface, it's that it gives me access to the Unix system in my pocket. Again, if you don't value that and don't get it, it's _fine_, really, but that doesn't mean it's without value to those who understand the value of such a thing.

Re:Revolution?

For me, it's a revolution just because it's the first product that has reached a critical mass point to make me less likely to use my laptop. I make my living from my laptop, and I'm kind of anchored to it, which affects my daily lifestyle. The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%. This changes my lifestyle dramatically. It's actually a bit traumatic (in a positive sense) and I haven't completely adjusted to it. I'm actually considering traveling more, taking more working vacations, taking up running... I don't know, it's like it has made *me* more portable without me having to discipline myself to be as such. The impact is difficult to measure.

IPhone Revolution?

Spare me. OpenMoko [openmoko.org] is an open platform that supports third party development.

Re:IPhone Revolution?

Spare me. OpenMoko is an open platform that nobody cares about.

It does look cool, but without an Apple sized hype-machine and good support from cell phone companies and service providers I don't see it taking off.

Re:IPhone Revolution?

Nobody cares about the iPhone as a platform either.

With no official SDK who is going to make applications for it? Maybe a couple of geeks happy to mess with something that's not documented and for which there's absolutely zero support from the vendor, but nobody of much importance. They'll have exactly the same problem you say OpenMoko has: That very few people will ever hear that something can be installed into an iPhone, and fewer yet will install something.

Installing applications will probably not be just a matter of point and click on a standard phone either.

The iPhone has an SDK

It's called HTML+CSS+JS.

I don't care for the iPhone, myself -- another closed proprietary system? I'll wait for OpenMoko.

But you kind of have to give them credit for one thing. If they had released an iPhone-only SDK, you'd see iPhone-only apps. By not releasing any SDK, and by releasing a real web browser for it, people are writing web apps designed for mobile devices [colloquy.info]. Which means they're not really tied to the iPhone.

I think that's kind of cool, actually.

Re:Beg to differ

Now you might say, that doesn't count because it's "just" a browser based app. But all of the applications listed there have been tailored to fit and work well on the iPhone. Most of the even use fragments of custom CSS that helps define the appearance for the iPhone specifically. If it's tailored to the platform, then how is using the browser as a GUI library really that much different than a true native app as far as the intent of the developer, and interaction by the user? There are even proof of concept web-based apps that detect phone rotation and respond accordingly...

It's fantastic. For years, I've heard Mac fans (amongst others, sure) moan loudly about web standards. Browser independence. Railing against websites that discriminate against Safari. That are "best viewed in IE".

Now, there's the iPhone. And suddenly coding HTML and CSS to meet the needs of one device / browser combination is apparently A-ok, because it's their device. I see.

Network impact

Assuming Apple doesn't take steps in a subsequent update to actively disable third party applications, this could provide a channel for showing (or not) that third party applications doesn't automatically mean disruption of the provider network. Hopefully the inaugural apps will play nice, creating pressure on Apple to release an SDK to make it more likely that subsequent apps also play nice, rather than start patching it closed like a console. Apple has to respond, but they could go either way.

telemarketers

I think the best use of this app would be to 'cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp' when a telemarketer calls.

Ultimate gaming platform?

And finally, and most important, we can only hope that someone develops ScummVM and MAME, two game emulation platforms, soon. I want unlimited classic arcade games and Monkey Island in my iPhone.

I hope all those classic games can be played with a single button...cause that's all you're getting.

Re:Ultimate gaming platform?

I hope all those classic games can be played with a single button...cause that's all you're getting.

Every SCUMM-based game uses the left mouse button only. As for the MAME stuff, that varies from game to game.

PSPhone DS

I recently saw an ad for an embedded game developer.... by apple. Requiring many years of experience etc yadda yadda yadda.

Here's the apple game dev ad [highendcareers.com].

This speaks legions to me, and it says Apple is not only going to turn the iPhone into a a cool smartphone, but they will also start selling games with it. IT has enough horsepower and screen real estate to take on the PSP..... and the DS, with the multi touch interface.

If it works and sells, Sony is going to shit big square bricks, Steve Ballmer is single handedly going to cause a world chair shortage, and Nintendo is going to be most challenged. Anything you can do with the DS, you can do with the iPhone.

Most, most interesting.

problems with it ...

running a legitatly activated iPhone 1.0.1. Used jailbreak and iphoneinterface to copy Terminal.app into /Applications. After rebooting the terminal app shows on the main screen, but when launched it only loads the background and crashes to the main screen after about 40 seconds...any ideas?

Re:problems with it ...

You've almost certainly not set the application file within the Terminal.app bundle to be executable once it's been transferred. Just like FTP, iphoneinterface always sets permissions to rw-r--r--

Simon

Whoa there boy...

Let's not make too many big leaps of logic...

Second, if Google Code is hosting this it probably means either that 1) Apple is giving the nod to this kind of development, 2) they are going to release an SDK or 3) Apple will realize the need for people to access the iPhone as a development platform to do really cool stuff with it. All three options are good for me.

Or, maybe it's anyone can create a project [google.com] there.

1 and 2 are ridiculous claims based off of this information, and I'm pretty sure they were already aware of #3 based off of the grumbling developers and blogs after WWDC.

What does it do?

MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application."

What does it connect to as a terminal? Does the iPhone have a serial port? Or is it a console window for the iPhone's operating system?

Re:What does it do?

Well, it's called MobileTerminal.app, and the iPhone runs a Darwin kernel. So, just guessing, but it would seem to be a mobile version of Terminal.app on normal OS X.

Meaning, it's "a console window for the iPhone's operating system", yes.

Which also means that if the iPhone had a serial port, you could talk to that with MobileTerminal. Or if you want SSH or Telnet, those clients will run in MobileTerminal.

Google's offering.

I wonder if Google will give us a shell on their new Linux phone [blogspot.com].

That said it'll be hard for them to beat the Phase 2 OpenMoko [openmoko.org] for developer fun.

sweet!

Now all it needs is a bluetooth external keyboard and i can sysadmin from anywhere! :)

If Apple and AT&T OK this, it's great.

If Apple and AT&T OK this (and having it show up in Google Code is no evidence of that) that's great. It means a native SDK and the iPhone will become a real smartphone.

If not, it's going to be an arms race between the wily hackers (in the good sense) wedging apps into the beast, and AT&T detecting them and disabling user's accounts for quote-hacking-unquote (in the media sense).

The Real Question is

i-emacs or i-Vi

not THAT revolutionary

given the time of the release, virtually every other major phone manufacturer has had smart phone/ multimedia phone, which .. either needed backward compatibility with their previous model (software/ platform), or were stuck with technology and cost of components (low res screen, expensive RAM, blooding of these fancy devices). Apple iPhone arrived at the perfect time when they had success with ipod (their name legendary with handheld multimedia gadget - ipod video + audio + clickwheel); virtually, the first access to NAND ram than any other company; previous experience with newton, and most importantly, they had so many failed aspects of various devices to study!!! a wealth of data.

...they were perfectly placed to do it.

that they actually, went ahead and created this phone is cool. thats another thing is associated with apple... 'cool'. make that iCool.

webserver

So can I use it to reboot my web server now?!

Re:Why can't we build stuff instead of prying apar

Why can't you have both? I hate to be the break it to you but the iPhone is a much better platform hardware wise than the FIC phone that is being sold to developers right now (minus the GPS of course, but even that uses a binary blob currently).
Openmoko is supposed to be an open-source platform, that will run on multiple phones. Being able to run code on the iPhone is the first step in getting an open platform like Openmoko out there. So don't discourage others from doing what they like. It's their choice, and they have something to bring to the table as well.

Re:other smart phones have been there for years

You'll be eating those words in 5 years, just like those 5-year old anti-iPod words you are eating now.

Re:other smart phones have been there for years

Seems to me they said iPhone, not smartphone.

Smartass dickwad.

Of course you could always enjoy that WindowsCE development, as shitty and convoluted as it is.

Re:HEY GUYS WE'RE FIRST!!!!!

You must've eaten a few thermometers as a kid. Am I right?