There’s a cottage industry of modifications and “native apps” for the iPhone, most of which involve jailbreaking the phone to remove various software restrictions that Apple has put in place. Indeed, a cell phone that essentially runs UNIX underneath the sweet candy interface can do some surprisingly useful things… and potetially some pretty stupid ones too.
Like, running a web server.
Apparently, the geeks that have spent countless hours obsessing over the innards of the iPhone had compiled Apache, Python and Vim, among other open source apps.
And all I can ask is, uhm, why?
I mean, custom ringtones is a nice thing to have. So are many of the other apps that have been created. And having a UNIX shell on your cellphone is kinda neat. But why, oh why, does someone REALLY want to run a web server from their iPhone?! I personally like to USE my phone, thanks very much, and it would be damned annoying if I couldn’t make calls or had to deal with slow response times because someone was busy downloading content. This is generally why people have dedicated servers that just serve web pages. In fact, for just a little more than the price of an iPhone, you COULD get a really good web server, that doesn’t require hacking or jailbreaking to get to work. And it looks damn cool, too.
But, I guess if you truly have no social life, the iPhone isn’t much use for anything else then, eh?
