After a very long period of ignoring Jiggy I finally decided to give it a try, the only problem it was that i didn’t have any idea to experiment with and i had no useful need of an iPhone application, so after thinking at it for a couple f hours i finally found something. Anyway the idea itself its not important first I wanted to get started with some tutorials just to get the hang of it.

Let’s get to the actual story because I’m feeling that I’m giving too many details (like I usually do), the thing is that I find the browser based IDE too primitive, it’s missing a lot of features but the most important one that doesn’t exist is the “autocomplete” feature. So of-course that i wanted to develop with TextMate, my favorite editor. The editing part presents no problem you can mount the iPhone file system very easy, via SSH (using sshfs) or via AFP, the real problem comes in when you want to debug or test the application. Actual that’s the only powerful feature of the web-based editor is the test/debug feature … hmmmm, that got me started I was sure I could replicate that in TextMate, said and done. The question was how, the answer was … very easy.

So, on the iPhone I installed Lighttpd with CGI support and Perl. Luckily I’m a Perl programmer and I had no problem writing a set of services for interacting with the iPhone via http trough a browser … something to start and stop an specific application. Well actually I couldn’t resist so I implemented an entire system, sort of a mini framework. With all of this all I had to do was to interact with these services through TextMate, said and done, now that’s why I really like this editor, it’s so flexible and adding features to it it’s like taking a walk in the park (that’s if you are a developer and you are on the right PATH). So I wrote a set of TextMate commands to control the application execution on the phone. Basically it’s just a class that sends and receives data using the LWP library, at the moment I’m still experiencing with it a little bit but sometime next week I’m sure I’ll have TextMate bundle ready.

Hey all after a long period of time, it’s been a while since I wrote an article … actually I haven’t wrote any this year, well to be honest I didn’t have a reason to write one since now. I had the “pleasure” to install firmware 1.1.4 on my iPhone, I’m sorry but the new version is absolutely horrible. Since yesterday I’m patching and changing modes on the filesystem in order to make it work normal. To be honest this is getting to be kinda frustrating and it reminds me of my Windows days when I had to do a lot of similar stuff, I don’t wanna get to the point where I install more patches than applications.