First native third-party applications running in iPhone

[Dashken]

Late last week, one "Nightwatch," an anonymous hacker familiar with the ARM processor family, wrote a "Hello, World!" program and ran it. Ordinarily, that wouldn't really be sufficient fodder for an Infinite Loop post, but this particular program is Kind of a Big Deal™. It was run on an iPhone—the first known non-native application to do so.

According to the iPhone Dev Wiki (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), Nightwatch's ARM/mach-o toolchain kit has successfully compiled its first non-AJAX iPhone application, a significant step forward in unlocking the secrets of the device (if not the device itself). Granted, it's rather a messy process at the moment, involving multiple installations of various and sundry open-source bits and the binaries that, once compiled, don't have much access to little things like OS X header files or whatnot. But the major hurdle, knowing it can be done, is now out of the way. Just don't expect to see Pocket Quicken in the next couple of weeks or anything.

Follow the team's progress via the IRC channel #iphone at irc.osx86.hu. (Try not to be a jerk in the channel, there's enough noise-to-signal as it is already.)

Source: http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...ning-on-iphone