ByteClub

Early talks

The conference hadn't been "officially" kicked off yet, but you could already feel the awesomeness and the brain power. In one of the 4 early talks scheduled for Sunday, Jay Freeman (saurik), the creator of Cydia, talked at length about code injection in iPhone apps using a framework that he created called MobileSubstrate, available on jailbroken devices. As far as I understand, this framework allows you to intercept Objective-C method calls at runtime in any application and modify app's behavior. The pinnacle of Jay's presentation was him hacking the built-in Maps application to stop the map rotating using iPhone 3GS' compass, and rotate the graphic (a half-transparent white cone) that indicates user's heading instead. It took about 2 hours, which mostly consisted of reverse-engineering Maps.app and trying to figure what to intercept and how to get to the relevant graphics layers - all of this without any access to that app's source code. Jay's tools of choice: IBM laptop, 'vim' editor and an SSH session to a jailbroken iPhone - not for the faint of heart. Even though some of this stuff might not be too relevant to "official" iPhone app development, it's good to get "close to the metal" every once in a while and reinforce the notion that iPhone is nothing more than a computing device and not some mythical being that feeds on Objective-C code. After all, how much can you really learn about your car if you never open the hood?

Party time!

Quick, what's a synonym for 360iDev? "Party" is a good answer. More specifically: plenty of beer, food, great group of people and some Rock Band. What else could you wish for?

It was a great start to a great conference - and it should only get better as the week progresses.

-- Peter Bakhirev