I’ve never actually been a fan of jail-breaking the iPhone nor the iPod, since it’s totally controversial. Most people who jail-break their devices think “Why should I just use 10% of what I could really use on that device?!“, though they don’t think twice: Why did they buy an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPod Touch? There are three kind of people who buy these things: The first type are the “cool” people. They like to pay the “Cool Tax” just to be cool themselves and impress other people. “Look how cool my new iPhone is!!!111“. Such people might jail-break, just because they’d like to be able to say “Oh well, sure, you got an iPhone, too, but look what mine has, that yours doesn’t!!!111“.

The second kind of people, jail-break their iDevices because they can. That’s it. Nothing more. These people are usually some people with more interest into technology, which just have fun doing such things. “Look, my iPhone runs an SSH session! And look, on my Xbox I have a media-center that looks just like Apple TV but has way more features. For free! And oh, my PSP runs Linux!!“. Those people in general do stuff like this because they enjoy it and don’t really much care of the device’s functionality. They don’t care if they won’t be able to play any games on their PSP anymore, they don’t care if they lose their rest-warranty on their Xbox and they don’t care if they won’t be able to read any e-mails on their iPhones anymore. They just don’t care, if it works properly (without hacking) or not.

What brings me to the third kind of people. Those buy products like the ones from Apple mainly because of one important reason: It simply works! You turn it on, you do what you need to do and then you turn it off. No hacking, no installing, no complex configuration, nothing. It just works.

However, the knowledge regarding IT/computers/devices of those people vary from none to I-could-write-my-own-OS. Those, who really know what they’re doing won’t jail-break their devices or if they will, they’re being kind-number-two. Those who don’t really know but hear from all kind of people (kind-number-one mostly) what cool things would be possible if they’d jail-break their devices, will also jail-break their devices one way or the other. And here the controversiality begins.

Why would someone want to spend the amount of $X on a device that’s totally managed, works exactly as it should and gives you only a number features, which therefor really work and then take highly experimental and nearly unsupported software, put it on exactly this device and try to do things with it that were never be planned to be done with that device.

Those people then realize, how crappy everything started to be, though their devices has an enhanced set of features now. They’re going to be yelling about everything that goes wrong and isn’t working out in a way you’d expect it from an Apple product – but they forget, that it’s not an Apple product anymore. At least not the software. Not all of it.

However, the same thing happens to people of kind-number-one, though the difference is, that those would never complain about their crappy set of new features in public.

Anyway, so as I said, I’m just restoring from the jail-break to Apple’s original. Not that I’m complaining or just tried to be “cool” – I was really interested on two things: First, if I manage it to jail-break it through a Windows XP VM and second, how the jail-breaking stuff evolved till now. I was really curious about the software available for the hacked firmware and the things you could do with it.

Unfortunately it’s still exactly as I thought: It’s nice to play around with, but it’s nothing for a productive, everyday use. The software is too unstable, too untested and totally hacked-together. The programmers didn’t follow any design- or usability-guidelines and in general everything looks too unstable. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that the people who’ve realized this did crap! I admire any hacker who’s contributing to this project. But that’s the exact point of it: Those are usually hackers/developers/freaks who don’t really care about usability-guidelines or stuff like that. Just like those people that were developing UIs for Linux once (and still are).

However, besides this, I didn’t really benefit of the jail-break. I used a cool theme, though my whole iPod got awfully slow because of that. As it seems, the original theme won’t be replaced by a new one, but instead it will be just “overlaid”. At least this was my impression when opening the Preferences, seeing the iPod’s standard theme, waiting some seconds for the iPod to become responsive again and then seeing the modified theme. And this of course also impacted on my battery life: By just listening to music I usually got 3 days of battery-life – and I listen a lot to music! With the jail-break installed, after one day I usually only had twenty-five percent of the battery-life left.

Eh, well. I played a bit around, I’ve seen the jail-break myself and I’ve also seen that it’s far from being called “oh this could really make me use it!“, at least by me. Oh, I guess my recovery has finished….

Strage Badge

Earlier this day I’ve just updated the software running on my jail-broken iPod Touch and received a new Version of the “Backgrounder”-application. Right after the update I turned off my iPod and when I turned it on again later, there were some curious badge icons on my application’s icons. The icons did not move or anything, and as it seems they only appeared when the application was running in the background – not the “Backgrounder” background, but Apple’s internal background stuff. For example, as soon as I turned on the WiFi, the Mail-icon got that badge, because the Mail process was up for Push-notifications. Same happened when I opened an application: As soon as I closed it, I saw that icon but it disappeared one second later again (-> because the application’s process quitted).

So, if you might wonder why you have that icon: It’s because of Backgrounder. I did not find out how to disable it – I’ve just removed it.