“By the standards of modern software, it wasn’t much. All the program did, after all, was display the words ‘Hello world!'” Arik Hesseldahl reports for BusinessWeek.
“What set it apart was the fact that it did so on Apple’s iPhone, and that it was created by a group of independent programmers without the blessing of the famously control-freakish company,” Hesseldahl reports.
“The simple little program appears to be the first downloadable program created for the iPhone, bypassing Apple’s ‘approved’ method of developing software for the device: applications hosted on Web sites and accessed through the iPhone’s Web browser rather than its internal memory,” Hesseldahl reports.
“And why all the effort? The basic hacker impulse: Curiosity, says Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with the Yankee Group and an iPhone user. ‘It’s really a powerful mobile computing platform the likes of which hasn’t been seen before, and a certain segment of the population is eager to play around with it,’ he says. ‘This is hacking in the purest sense, not for causing trouble or getting free service, but just tinkering around,'” Hesseldahl reports.
It also raises the hope of building practical, useful applications, as Hesseldahl reports in the full article here.