Over these past few days, there's been a veritable rush of third party applications for the iPhone. Unfortunately, while independent development for jailbroken iPhones was going extremely well, only a small fraction of the iPhone using population was ever going to make use of these programs. The iPhone development communities, realizing that ease of use is the essential factor in widespread third party application adoption, have been developing a specialized iPhone tool that will streamline the processes of both installing third-party programs to the iPhone and obtaining command-line access to its inner workings.

The Installer.app utility that has just been released will fully automate the process of jailbreaking the iPhone's file system and uploading a software package manager. Once up and running, the Mac OS X application makes it easy to download and install any of the unofficial third-party programs already written for the iPhone using either WiFi or EDGE. Similarly, the developers of iPHUC have terminal access to the iPhone dead easy. Through the new Universal Binary, users can now use a single program that lets both kinds of Mac open a UNIX prompt that can manually send files, run scripts, or otherwise change the functionality of the iPhone by hand. This approach eliminates the need for MacPorts and other intermediary tools that were previously needed just to get to the core of the iPhone's OS.

Although neither of these two solutions are an official Apple SDK, they should accelerate both development of third party applications for the iPhone and adoption of these applications. Unlocking the capabilities of the iPhone is now easier than ever with the SIM hacks that let customers bypass the carrier restrictions. The iPhone is quickly getting to the point where it is truly open. These new developments work perfectly fine with the latest versions of Mac OS X, iTunes, and the iPhone 1.0.1 update, requiring nothing special and no code rollbacks.