If you're waiting for a jailbreak tool for the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware (and you aren't eager to hang around for the promised update to Ziphone), iNdependence 1.4 beta 5 might be for you. The latest version of the tool is built to work with the new iPhone firmware without difficulty.
iNdependence is billed as the "easy-to-use interface for jailbreak, activation, SSH installation, and ringtone/wallpaper/application installation on your iPhone." With the new beta, the SIM unlocking (gunlock) capability is rolled in. Full changelog is here.
As always, you jailbreak or unlock your device at your own risk. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
What the heck happened to resolution independence?
In Gruber's review of the Powerbook a few years ago, he trumpeted the coming of a feature long evading the Mac faithful, a resolution independent interface. Others at the time expected the same thing to appear in Leopard: UI elements that were completely independent of the screen's resolution, and, finally, a fully scalable interface, and freedom from whatever screen you were working on. Higher resolutions without squeezing down the UI elements. And as we got closer to Leopard, more and more word went around that OS 10.5 would have it. At WWDC 2006, some developers even confirmed it. And Apple even filed a patent to get it done.
Except now it's November, Leopard is out, and resolution independence is nowhere to be found, at least at the user-accessible level. What gives?
We just received word that Independence, the interactive Cocoa jailbreak program for iPhone has been updated to version 1.2.2 and now supports 1.1.1 jailbreaks. The notes on the site say the the activation/jailbreak process is more complicated than it had been previously, presumably due to the infrastructure changes to 1.1.1.
Tim Gaden (of Hawk Wings fame) has written an interesting article for his 'day job' column at APC Magazine about the possibility of our friends down under getting a first peek at Apple's forthcoming update to Mac OS X, 10.5 Leopard. Apparently, Apple has sent emails stating that they will be previewing the August WWDC during special seminars in Australian capitals during the month of June - nearly two months before the real WWDC takes the stage.
If this is true, it would be great to hear real details of what Leopard is going to bring, as opposed to mere rumors of a re-built and Spotlight-dependent Finder, Windows virtualization and resolution independence. Here's hoping our Australian neighbors can't keep secrets very well.
There is a lot of buzz and speculation floating around as to what we'll see in the Mac OS X 10.5 update that will be previewed (and I suspect released) at this August's World Wide Developer's Conference. One exciting 'fundamental feature' John Gruber hinted at last November has been mentioned again by a developer named Dustin MacDonald: resolution independence.
Gruber broke this concept down in a November '05 post titled Full Metal Jacket (under the Display heading), but to summarize: most of the dimensions of elements in Mac OS X (and other OSes to my knowledge) are defined in pixels - the menu bar is 22 px high, for example. This explains why things 'seem to look a little smaller' when you move from the 1024 x 768 dimensions of a 12" display to the 1440 x 900 resolution of the latest 15" PowerBook G4 or MacBook Pro displays. Conversely, if you decrease the resolution on the machine you're working on now, things will look a bit bigger; you have smaller resolution and fewer ppi (or dpi) on screen, so some elements change size. This can become a problem in the context of notebook displays and their resolutions - if you take the 15" MacBook Pro's resolution higher than 1440 x 900, things could become smaller than what many might consider usable (these same rules apply to Windows and I believe Linux as well). Further, you can't just keep increasing notebook display sizes like you can with desktop displays; I've heard of the 19" notebooks Engadget has come across, and I personally don't consider a 16 lb computer worthy of the 'portable' adjective.
If you're waiting for a jailbreak tool for the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware (and you aren't eager to hang around for the promised update to Ziphone), iNdependence 1.4 beta 5 might be for you. The latest version of the tool is built to work with the new iPhone firmware without difficulty.
What the heck happened to resolution independence?
Tim Gaden (of Hawk Wings fame) has written an interesting 
