of course he nearly immediately fixed his gaze longingly upon the nearly discarded iphone 1st generations that were sitting on the shelf and he somehow persuaded me to see about jailbreaking the phone so he could use it for an upcoming trip. given my need to just have my phone work and not having the time to hack away on my phone, i have largely ignored the jailbreaking phenomenon. i simply pay for the phone that works on the network where i get support and i move along.  it’s not interesting, but the focus is the workflow.

for folks who hack on iphones as a matter of hobby, this is the mythic maze of twisty passages all alike and there’s no shortage of lore, clueful and clueless folks and tons of poseurs in this particular subculture.  however, a few googles and i’m knee deep in the world of colored sn0w jokes and DFU mode on the phone.  now here’s the rub, when you’re hacking devices which are nearly 4 years old and have subsequently gone through numerous iterations, this culture seems to leave a lot of poorly organized detritus in its wake.  folks have moved their attentions to hacking the 3G versions, the iPhone 4 and dealing with the various baseband hacks that apple has rendered useless. this involves no shortage of following scores of spotty web sites to dead ends and working one’s way through oodles of lame message boards.  in the end, the cable and a little bit of redsn0w got the job done.  followed up by a jailbreakme.com fix to correct a horked cydia installation.

some interesting tangential observations:

• there are some teenagers with some impressive technical savvy that pull together some reasonably decent screencast and tutorial videos.  i lacked the patience to wade through them, but i was surprised how google is willing to prioritize video search results and how these things seemed to have pretty high hit and watch #s.  good job guys.
• oh. my. god. is the 1st gen iphone slow, or what? we thought this shit was amazing at one point. how quickly we get spoiled.
• t-mobile coverage in our house is for shit.  if little dude wants to use this as a phone he’s going to have to go out on the deck to make his calls.  i might be forced to reconsider how crappy i consider AT&T’s coverage to be.

turning a page in eucalyptus

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg.  this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg.  behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book.  insane attention to detail is visible everywhere.

the text is rendered in very high quality fonts, the animation is tight and the search function is spot on.  my only nit, is the lack of graphics for books which do have photos.

http://eucalyptusapp.com/ – definitely worth the $9.99 that they’re asking for it.

i should point out that i’ve also purchased classics (http://www.classicsapp.com/) which is equally stunning visually. however, the library that’s embedded inside classics is anemic.  while they’ve taken great care to display the content beautifully i find myself aching for more content.  i’d give up some of the visual appeal for the content and the portability.  eucalyptus seems to have struck a very nice balance here.

while all these two apps are capable reading platforms, i do find them lacking a few features which i really irritate me.  specifically these:

• the ability to annotate or make notes. now, i know that there are all sorts of additional considerations associated with this and there’s a corresponding need to provide a means to extract those notes into a different application, provide sexy input overlay, etc.  but i’m a margin writer or a highlighter.  if i like a book i like to make it mine.  while this is a general nit with ebooks, i would love to find a reasonably decent digital proxy.  failing this, i would like …
• the ability to copy a selected region of text and use the paste function to bring that content into another application for sharing or notes.  seems like a pretty duh item for me, particularly given that the content is all without copyright encumbrance.

these are hardly damning criticisms of these apps, in fact they’re more reflective of my desire to have a host of reading functionality in my pocket which to date i haven’t been able to find.  these apps represent the greatest non-kindle based means of portable reading that i’ve personally poked at and i find my curiosity piqued and a couple of things lacking.