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Day July 20, 2008

iPhone 2.0 Software and the App Store

    

iPhone Dev Team‘ released the latest version of their Pwnage Tool yesterday which meant that I could finally upgrade my iPhone 2G to the 2.0 firmware. With the 2.0 firmware comes the biggest addition, the App Store – which allows third party applications developed through the iPhone SDK to run on users phones. Free and paid applications are available and the starting line-up of software is actually rather good.

Thus far, I’ve installed AIM, AOL Radio, Bloomberg News, Bank of America Mobile Banking, Evernote, Facebook, Mobile News by AP, NetNewsWire, Pandora, Remote, Twitterrific, Where, Whrrl and Yelp. In the short time I’ve played around with it, it seems that Bloomberg, Pandora and Remote will be the most useful. Bloomberg’s application offers a better way to interface with their news stories and market data (with support for landscape charting!). Pandora is a user-friendly client for the Pandora online radio service which works wonderfully. Lastly, Remote is an application from Apple that allows one to remotely control their iTunes library or Apple TV from the iPhone.

The firmware itself has been rather stable albeit a bit more sluggish that 1.1.4 but I assume that will be fixed in time. This software update will hold me over until I can buy the iPhone 3G (16GB white, yo).

Solution: Bouncing Dock Icon for Pwnage Tool 2

Are you having an issue where the PwnageTool from the iPhone dev-team simply will not launch on your computer? For many, it just bounces in the dock for about three minutes and then does absolutely nothing (it sticks around in the dock except you will not see the open application indicator under it). This seems to be affecting primarily MacBook and MacBook Pro owners but it also is failing on some older PowerPC equipment.

It’s a pretty easy fix although.

Open ‘Activity’ Manager and show all processes (even root)
Quit the process named ‘ps’ (you will be asked for admin privileges)

You should do this while the PwnageTool is open. Also, you will need to ensure the folders \<user>\Library\iTunes\Device Support and \<user>\Library\iTunes\iTunes Software Updates  exist on your machine.

To be quite honest, I’m not certain what the ‘ps’ process does and you should always take cautiou when fiddling with processes on your machines; however I have used this will no ill effects however I did restart once I finished ‘pwning’ the phone. Good luck!

EDIT (7/21): This bug has since been fixed in version 2.0.1, read here.