iPhone gets Terminal development

A team of intrepid developers appear to have developed their own native GUI iPhone application. Called MobileTerminal, it emulates a command-line environment on the iPhone. Details are a little sketchy at present, but the team’s Google Code page says: “MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application.” I’m not precisely sure if this is to the iPhone as Terminal is to Mac OS X, allowing full access to programs and the file structure, but it appears that it might, which has some very exciting potentials for future development.

Of course, for the average user, the hurdle is still the program’s installation. You’ll need to download the app (or build it from source yourself, if you’re feeling tech savvy), then use the Jailbreak application to drop it into the iPhone’s Applications directory. Supposedly, that’s all that’s needed: at that point, the app will show up on the iPhone’s home screen, and you can run it from there.

As always, you hack your iPhone at your own risk: there’s a good chance subsequent software updates from Apple will either remove or refuse to work with these alterations. But if you give it a try, let us know how the results are.

[via Gizmodo]

Category: Hacking, Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Aug 3 2007, 4:44 PM ET

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