Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone
iPhone PXL format goes dark
The iPhone Package and eXtension Library (PXL) was the open source community's response to Nullriver's wildly popular Installer.app. It worked with the iBrickr tool on Windows and Breezy tool on OS X. During its heyday, it enjoyed mild success but the release of iPhone firmware 1.1.1 put the first nails in its coffin. Breezy stopped development. iBrickr has not yet been updated to support 1.1.1.
The main PXL repository has closed up shop. A note on its main page states that Extremis, the repository maintainer, will no longer be maintaining the PXL packages. Since no volunteers have stepped forward to pick up the reins, the PXL project is for all purposes dead.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mobilehavoc said 11:33AM on 11-16-2007
Good riddens. Now at least there's a single standard which should make it easier to ensure you always get the latest version, etc.
Competition is usually good but in this case, standardization is more important.
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(01) said 11:36AM on 11-16-2007
It seems a little funny to use the word "heyday" in conjunction with something that was around less than 2 months ago....anyway, we'll be swimming in the sea of open SDK soon.
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dizilbdog said 12:00PM on 11-16-2007
So does these mean installer.app is all done or nullriver is just taking over? I'm wondering if I should just restore my iPhone and just wait for the apple's third party apps to come alone???
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ha said 12:10PM on 11-16-2007
silencing the opposition, communist leader erica?
please take your hacking posts elsewhere, TUAW is not an advanced hacking blog. start a new blog, the hackers will follow you there, then we will all be happy.
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Patrick McCarron said 12:23PM on 11-16-2007
I've pretty much ignored PXL but meant to go back and look at it more. I wanted to investigate it's auto-update ability for Applications.
I'd rather have my Apps notify the user a new version is available and allow them to download it on the fly. Having to alert the package maintainers to update my Apps due to an important bug-fix is not that efficent.
Since PXL is dead, I will be probably be looking into doing this myself instead of their method.
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Greg Meach said 1:03PM on 11-16-2007
That's quite unfortunate considering Installer app itself is NOT open source (even though the notice said it would be) and once they start charging for their service you'll see the usual knee-jerk reaction and completely shocked users. So how long do you think they will "give away" their bandwidth and services? (remember there's no free lunch)
I still create, use and support PXL with my 1.1.2 firmware iPhone and Leopard (must use pre 7.4.2 iTunes). On the previous release of iSwitcher there were almost 8000 downloads of the PXL package, clearly there are still a lot of users. In just a few days there have been almost 700 downloads of the newest version in PXL format.
I also use it with my own "remod" pak so after a restore (you do that when you develop iPhone apps) I simply install one PXL package and I have all my mods restored including custom sounds, images and tweaks.
Sad day indeed....
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Tom said 1:41PM on 11-16-2007
another freetard failure, installer.app has always been superior
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Drunknbass said 3:50PM on 11-16-2007
if installer app starts charging i will make my license on all apps freeware with the exception of sharing over "installer.app" why should they make $ on other devs hard work.
i can easily host my own apps .
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Sparks said 1:49AM on 11-17-2007
The basic idea was that you should not have to go to a single repository -- you should have the option, but you should also be able to just put a single file up on a website with updates (and not require people to either build binaries or be ready to SCP files to their phone). But the issue was just that there was not much community interest and the handful of folks trying to make that idea all had day jobs which had nothing to do with the iPhone, so PXL was always a little affection-starved and never quite reached the point that it needed to be at.
There were lots of planned additions in the pipeline (including my favorite, a tool which would back up all installed packages by bundling them into a single .pxl file and copying it to your computer so you could click on a single 'phonename-backup.pxl' and instantly put everything back after a restore).
But in the end the issue was that no one else was particularly interested in contributing to the project, and after a while the developers found it hard to maintain the enthusiasm necessary to keep it all going in the time that could be grabbed here and there. In this case, the community spoke and definitely prefers the closed-source, over-the-air Installer.app method of doing things to PXL's proposed open framework. And hey, that's okay too; the solution that works more easily for people is clearly the over-the-air single repository, rather than download-and-install like desktop apps.
There had been hope of combining the two and providing a single open-source framework to allow apps to auto-update, to be installed from desktop, OR to be installed from an over-the-air repository like Installer.app... but in the end, the combined form just never materialized.
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Kai Cherry said 8:50AM on 11-17-2007
Well said Sparks...well said.
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