thank jebus. the cat and mouse game with apple and the iphone dev team, while fun to watch, has been ridiculous. i bought my iphone when developers were starting to put out some cool programs using the ‘jailbreak’ by the iphone dev team. it seemed like almost every day the installer tool was getting updated versions of all the programs and iphone life was great. then when v1.1.1 came out and broke all of those apps, development of the apps stopped, and the dev team went back and started working on a new jailbreak. and now, just about a week after the ipdt released a working jailbreak with friendly gui, apple announced that they would be releasing an official sdk in february.

so no more programs that are restricted to web 2.0 apps, and wacky-hackiness. i had mixed feelings about the cat and mouse game anyway. with so much interest in how to hack the iphone to make it run third party apps, software developers were finding all of the security holes in the phone that could be used for evil. on the other hand, i thought it might force apple to offer better native apps in their updates so that i would want to install the new firmware. i guess it doesn’t matter now though. with all of the development that has been done so far in the hacked state, i can only imagine how much support there will be from third parties with an sdk.