Book review: ‘iPhone Hacks’ from O’Reilly Media

Posted by Daniel East May 18, 2009 at 3:30am

By Donna Robertson
The most important message of this book, iPhone Hacks, by David Jurick, Adam Stolarz and Damien Stolarz, is that any user can start with the basic out‐of‐the box iPhone and create a tool that is essential to his/her daily life.

We lose sight of the fact that technology is never perfect when it is introduced to the masses. I have a theory that there is a fine line between the features included in any device and the features left out. Apple has always been very good at giving the user just enough to whet the appetite. From the early Apple II and IIe (my first computer) to the iPod to the iPhone, Apple has released a constant stream of products that actually perform while also seeming to encourage more creative users to tweak and hack their way to the perfect device.

I was a little intimidated by the book’s cover photo of a soldering iron and the inner guts of the iPhone exposed, and the authors do, in the final chapters of the book, go into some physical aspects of hacking the iPhone, but the main thrust of the book is a very clear explanation of the iPhone operating system and the infinite ways the system can be tweaked using coding or commercially produced apps. You can use an iPhone to run a presentation, connect it to your home network, create a podcast or control your laptop. You can read an eBook on your iPhone, take panorama photos, and automatically convert your voicemail to text. The authors even tell you how to use your iPhone while wearing gloves! Now, how cool is that (no pun intended)!

The authors don’t pretend to know it all and yet they provide us with exactly the knowledge we need by calling on contributors from an electrical engineering student to a photographer to a teen‐age App Store entrepreneur. The information is presented in a non‐threatening, very easy to read format. Probably the highest praise I can give the authors is: I didn’t know I wanted to hack my iPhone until I read this book. And now I know I can.

You can get more information on iPhone Hacks at O’Reilly Media.

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