hacking the iphone

So, I broke down and got an iPhone today. Yeah, I'm a weak willed, sad, man. However, it is an awesomely fun toy.

Of course, about an hour after I got it, I proceeded to hack the living crap out of it.

A couple lessons I learned, for those of you who might be hacking yours. When you start using iphoneinterface to copy files to your phone, you put and get files using "putfile" and "getfile". putfile only takes full file paths. Like:

putfile /foo/bar/icon.png

If you do it with non full paths, it copies to the root of the iphone. However, getfile only does LOCAL files. So whatever directory you're in, it gets from that directory. If you do full path names, it core dumps and craps itself all over the place.

Yeah, they don't really mention that on any of the sites I read.

So what does it look like? I'm glad you asked. First thing I did was put new ringtones on that bad boy. Pretty easy, just create a ringtones directory in /var/root/Library/Ringtones, and copy your MP3s to it. So easy, you'd think maybe Apple would have let us do it, instead of having to hack the goddamn thing. You know, like every other smart phone does.

Next, I wanted to start hacking the interface. This was a little trickier and more tedious, but involved the same basic idea, of copying new icon files to various directories on the iPhone (/Applications/AppName/icon.png usually).

Wow, does this look awesome. Here's what it looked like at first:



And here's the new super cool looking version:



Woo woo!

I even copied out the old icons, so I could replace them if I ever wanted to. But I don't think I'll want to. These new ones are sweet (with the exception of the SMS one, which seems like they completely ran out of creativity on. However, I also couldn't think of a good picture to represent SMS, so... )

Lots of other things to do now, like getting tethering working, and an ssh client, and some other stuff.

What a fun toy to hack on. The community has made tools that make it super easy.

Links:

I used the following sites a LOT tonight - cre.ations.net , hacktheiphone.com , and the modmyiphone.com forums. Thanks, guys!