Hack your iPhone: toolchains and cross-compilers

The iPhone can run “web apps” very easily. These web apps are really just specially-crafted web pages that take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in web browser. Such web apps can be very cool, but they don’t provide the full functionality that you can get from an actual executable program running on the iPhone. A “native app” that runs on the iPhone can read the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, for example.

So lots of people want to write independent/third-party native apps that run on the iPhone. The problem is that while Apple hasn’t squashed the development of native apps, they haven’t helped, either. For example, Apple hasn’t provided a toolchain to compile programs for the iPhone. (Read more...)