Apple TV Lowtide (Front Row) running on iPod touch

It's been Apple TV-palooza here at TUAW today. Shortly after discovering that the Apple TV iOS firmware could be downloaded and unpacked, we took our first peek under the hood and saw just how similar the new Apple TV, with its Lowtide software, was to previous Apple TV releases. Soon after, we discovered that the Lowtide application was built with multi-device support, including the iPad, in its list of supported hardware.

Now, developer Dustin Howett has managed to port Lowtide to an iPod touch and run it under iOS 4.1. You can see him running the Apple TV Lowtide software in this video. It's really amazing to see just how compatible the diverse systems are.
This is probably not something you'll want to do yourself. And the reason is pretty technical, so please excuse me while I get all jargony on you. Extracting frameworks from the iPhone's "dyld" cache system was not enough to get the app to run (an approach I initially tried). Instead, you need to use caches native to Apple TV, which is the approach Howett used.

This is a Bad Thing to do if you plan on using your device for anything but a candidate for restoring your firmware after getting everything to work. Seriously, ... unless you are utterly devoted to the thrill of being among the first to have Apple TV software running on your iPod or iPhone, you will not want to have to go through the steps of a full software restore afterwards.

Howett tells TUAW, that users should "not feel compelled to blow away their devices" trying to duplicate his results.
Share