i got my itouch a couple months back and have to say, it is one of the most impressive technologies i have experienced. i dig my interfaces and the multi-touch surface and tilt sensors provide for new and completely intuitive ways of interacting with the devices applications.
as good as it is, the novelty did wear off after about a week due to the locked down nature of the device. i still took it everywhere but there was nothing new to learn or experience and it did become just another ipod. that is until last weekend…
i heard about some teenager hacking the iphone before doing his math homework but didn’t quite register the importance of this achievement until stumbling onto a clip of an iphone being used as a controller for a i3L VJ software. Basically a client app sits on the iphone/itouch transmitting data to a host app over wifi which received the data and scales it to midi messages, meaning you can use the iphone as a wireless midi controller, or effectively connect it as a controller to any application.
another very impressive example is by Masayuki Akamatsu aka.iphone experiments, check out the vid here.
i got busy looking for the hack that made it all possible and found instructions on jailbreaking your iphone, almost ridiculous how easy it is. at the moment the jailbreak works on all versions of the iphone and itouch although an update is scheduled soon which will most likely attempt to cover these hacks.
there is already a very active community of developers coming up with great apps on a daily basis. for a starting point for building your own native iphone apps, check out iphonedevdocs.com, plenty of tutorials and forum activity.
