iPhone software: the community hacks, Apple improves

It's been a heckuva few weeks for iPhone devs, has it not? We've gone all the way from the crushing depression of knowing we'd have to play within the web sandbox, to the first hints of compiled goodness, to this -- the first true, native 3rd party app with useful functionality. As the name implies, MobileTerminal is a terminal emulator (and yes, it does actually install a new icon on the home screen) that should let the more 1337 among us execute arbitrary commands to their portable bundles of Mac OS X joy; as the Google Code page astutely notes, it's not a telnet or ssh client, though an ssh client can be fired up from the terminal. The code is open and development seems to be going fast and furious, so keep an eye out for updates, like, hourly!

But wait, there's more: it turns out Apple covertly sneaked in some goodies of its own when it rolled out the nebulously-described 1.01 firmware earlier this week. Uncle Walt himself discovered that the Phone app's Favorites tab has been upped from 20 entries to a more usable 50, the option to BCC yourself when sending email has been added, and a number of external audio devices with iPod docks that the iPhone previously rejected are now miraculously working, it seems. So much for "bug fixes" only, eh, Apple?

[Thanks, Tom K.]

Read - MobileTerminal
Read - Walt's discoveries in 1.01

[Brian J. Noe @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:47PM]

Can SOMEONE Just Get Skype to work on the Iphone??? Please So I can make cheap Calls. Great You can hack the phone to smitherines, but you can still only call Out threw ATT.

[S-Anarchy @ Aug 6th 2007 2:03PM]

soonr.com should let you use Skype with your iPhone for now.

[paloooz @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:53PM]

I can't get it to work.

The application runs, I can see the Default.png loaded, the keyboard never appears, the homebutton is disabled, and it crashes after about 20 seconds.

Fun stuff.

[matt @ Aug 3rd 2007 6:59PM]

but macs never crash?

[a boy @ Aug 3rd 2007 7:01PM]

Send it to apple repair, maybe you'll get the new tool everybody's talking about when they send it back!

[paloooz @ Aug 4th 2007 7:21PM]

Got it. I needed to enable SSH so I could chmod +x Terminal.app/Terminal

It works great now!

[kogasira @ Aug 3rd 2007 8:49PM]

I also noticed significant improvements in iPhone Bluetooth stack working with different hands free kits. Specifically, Audi and Mercedes kits work flawlessly now, where before the iPhone was continuously loosing connection and then reconnecting again.

[derek @ Aug 4th 2007 12:08AM]

Of course if you can afford an Audi and Benz, you can also afford an iPhone...

[Bee Hatch @ Aug 4th 2007 9:27AM]

Your moms pc crashed on me last night.

[Neebs @ Aug 3rd 2007 7:39PM]

I would like to comment on tthat the "no iPhone" RSS pipe you gave us aroun iPhone launch still works.

Thank you Engadget!

[J. Evans Turner @ Aug 4th 2007 1:30PM]

Then how did you find yourself in this article? ;)

[Neebs @ Aug 4th 2007 6:07PM]

I happened to be looking for something, so I went to the main page, and I saw something I didn't recognize seeing in my RSS reader. It was an iPhone.

[Miles @ Aug 5th 2007 3:29PM]

Damn hackers.

[BiG� @ Aug 6th 2007 2:18PM]

In the 1.0.1 release, they also added an Outbox to mail accounts. It was weird not having one to begin with in 10 :-/

[Craig @ Aug 6th 2007 11:07AM]

Sounds great. Just need an iPhone to try it on ^_^