“The now non-existent iPhone developer NDA seems to have been holding back a flood of useful and diverse information. IBM has contributed to this information deluge with their release of a tutorial , authored by PJ Cabrera, on how to use the Eclipse C Development Toolkit (CDT) to program native applications for the Apple iPhone with open source tools,” Bob Rudis reports for The Apple Blog.

“Unfortunately, any application you create will not be headed for the App Store any time soon since it requires you to jailbreak your device by using any one of the more popular utilities (e.g. QuickPwn, XPwn, Pwnage, and WinPwn). While many iPhone users have used these tools to “free” their devices, I am still not a proponent of doing this since the practice is not supported by Apple in any way, and their use may void the device’s warranty if Apple has evidence of third-party software modification. You also open yourself up to device corruption and security problems due to the fact that jailbroken applications have free reign over every bit of data in your phone,” Rudis reports. “If you do go this route, your application will reach the widest audience via Cydia.”

“The article/tutorial is a good read just for the ‘Resources’ section (tons of good URLs for both iPhone development and coding in general), but I still strongly discourage folks from jailbreaking their devices. I realize Apple left Windows/Linux developers out in the cold, but there are other ways to protest such decisions besides doing something which could render your expensive device utterly useless,” Rudis reports.

Full article, with link to IBM’s materials, here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Judge Bork" for the heads up.]