iPhone hacker Nate True has been digging around in update 1.1.3 and he’s made a couple of interesting discoveries, most of which shouldn’t come as a surprise. The changes basically add up to signifying that the 1.1.3 update appears to be all ready to support applications developed with Apple’s forthcoming Software Development Kit. For example, as we’ve seen with the Web Clip support, you no longer need to hack the Springboard application to support multiple screens of applications or reorder icons; likewise, all programs are run as a user named “mobile” rather than on earlier versions where all apps were run by the root superuser (a dangerous security vulnerability, since root can be used to make all sorts of potentially malicious changes).
But that’s not all Nate’s offering: he’s also come up with a way to use the new Web Clip feature from 1.1.3 to support something that many an iPhone user has been asking for: speed dial icons on the Home screen.
In order to do this, you’ll either need some technical savvy or you’ll have to put a bit of trust in Nate: basically the hack works by writing a script on a web server that takes a phone number in the URL and then tries to initiate a call with it. You can turn that page into a Web Clip; voilà, you’ve got an icon on your Home screen that will call a specified number. The only catch is that because of the iPhone’s built-in security features, you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to call the number, which may or may not make it faster than using the double-tap Home button method introduced in 1.1.1.
