Commercial iGadget jailbreaking services?

Basic question:

Are there any commercial jailbreaking services that can and will,
for a modest fee, exercise their skills to customize the operation
of owner-supplied examples of the iPod/iTouch/iPad genre of
iGadgets? (including removing any iTunes requirements)

If so, I'm a likely customer -- just post your offer here in the
newsgroups or on a web site. (No private offers, please; I only
want to deal with responsible, out in the open providers.)

Background info:

In a post appended below for reference, BreadWithSpam defends the
iTunes controlled, "appliance-centered" approach taken by Apple in all
these gadgets, and I have no quarrel with most of what he says. (I do
still believe Jobs _had_ to include the DRM and related controls built
into the iGadget ecosystem in order to get the deals he wanted from
major content providers, and that this was a primary motivation.)

And, in a further response "Lewis" adds:

Apple doesn't give a **** about jailbreaking. Do they support
it or encourage it, of course not. Do they go out of their way
to prevent it? No, they don't . . . If Apple wanted to stop
jailbreaking, they could do it. They don't care enough to take
those steps.

OK, so I have a couple of earlier iPods sitting around, that I'd like to
have jailbroken so that I could use them to do just two very elementary
tasks: serve as an elementary USB flash drive for any kind of files, and
simultaneously play appropriately formatted audio files that have been
drag and dropped onto them, ***without ever going with 100 miles of any
copy of iTunes***.

Those two capabilities are obviously already built into the internal
libraries or firmware or whatever of these iPods. Anyone want to make a
responsible, public, commercial offer to break them loose, while
discarding any other capabilities that may have to be lost. If so, I'm
a potential customer


================================================
EARLIER POST:
In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
>
> Um, no. There's no correlation between the use of iTunes to load files
> on the device and a requirement for DRM.
>
> There is a correlation between using iTunes and the fact that
> the OS is designed to keep users from mucking about in the filesystem.
> While you may find that annoying (and I find it annoying every once
> in a while), for the most part, it's there to keep people from
> screwing up the machine. That's part of how it remains
> "appliance-like".
>
> If it annoys you so much, then it's clear that you are not the
> target audience.
>
> And it clearly has some shortcomings - which Apple is trying to
> work around through things like the "send file to app" functionality
> they've recently added. But the notion of keeping files with their
> associated apps and organized by those apps is a fascinating
> experiment in appliance-ification. And has nothing whatsoever to
> do with DRM except in your imagination.
>
> Whether it ends up successful, we'll find out eventually. But
> kudos to Apple for trying to come up with a machine which is
> awfully difficult for a user to screw up.

In article <siegman-(E-Mail Removed)>,
AES <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> Basic question:
>
> Are there any commercial jailbreaking services that can and will,
> for a modest fee, exercise their skills to customize the operation
> of owner-supplied examples of the iPod/iTouch/iPad genre of
> iGadgets? (including removing any iTunes requirements)

why would anyone pay to jailbreak when it can be done for free in just
minutes?

> If so, I'm a likely customer -- just post your offer here in the
> newsgroups or on a web site. (No private offers, please; I only
> want to deal with responsible, out in the open providers.)

just visit the iphone dev team's blog and follow their suggestions.

note that there is no jailbreak for ios firmware 4.0.2 and higher at
this time, but based on comments from various dev team members, there
will be one soon.

> OK, so I have a couple of earlier iPods sitting around, that I'd like to
> have jailbroken so that I could use them to do just two very elementary
> tasks: serve as an elementary USB flash drive for any kind of files, and
> simultaneously play appropriately formatted audio files that have been
> drag and dropped onto them, ***without ever going with 100 miles of any
> copy of iTunes***.

why not just install an app that does what you need? no jailbreak
required.

vlc (released yesterday) can play various formats on ipads but the ipod
version is not yet available. there are dozens and dozens of apps that
turn the ipod touch into a wireless flash drive, and some of which can
handle different file formats.

On 21/09/2010 17:45, AES wrote:
> Basic question:
>
> Are there any commercial jailbreaking services that can and will,
> for a modest fee, exercise their skills to customize the operation
> of owner-supplied examples of the iPod/iTouch/iPad genre of
> iGadgets? (including removing any iTunes requirements)
>

Don't understand this. If you exclude *all* elements of the Apple system
entirely from the device, then there are better hardware alternatives
(sound quality, camera quality, 'missing' HW/SW interfaces) available on
other devices. May as well not bought into the system in the first place.

--
Adrian C

In article <210920101333488330%(E-Mail Removed)>,
nospam <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> vlc (released yesterday) can play various formats on ipads but the ipod
> version is not yet available. there are dozens and dozens of apps that
> turn the ipod touch into a wireless flash drive, and some of which can
> handle different file formats.

How does one explore/discover this kind of stuff? Just about every app
I have on my iPod is there because somebody told me about it. Any time
I have tried to search the app store for something I might find useful I
come up empty. Often I have one app that does something and works when
there are several other apps that do the same thing better. I don't
know how to find them.

In article <bob-(E-Mail Removed)>,
Robert Peirce <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>How does one explore/discover this kind of stuff? Just about every app
>I have on my iPod is there because somebody told me about it. Any time
>I have tried to search the app store for something I might find useful I
>come up empty. Often I have one app that does something and works when
>there are several other apps that do the same thing better. I don't
>know how to find them.

That's a good question. The search features of the iTunes store are
lame.

There is a web site appshopper.com that has some good articles. I don't
know if it is the best such website. Oh well, at least I got the ball
rolling, right?
--
David Arnstein (00)
arnstein+(E-Mail Removed) {{ }}
^^

In article <bob-(E-Mail Removed)>, Robert
Peirce <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> > vlc (released yesterday) can play various formats on ipads but the ipod
> > version is not yet available. there are dozens and dozens of apps that
> > turn the ipod touch into a wireless flash drive, and some of which can
> > handle different file formats.
>
> How does one explore/discover this kind of stuff? Just about every app
> I have on my iPod is there because somebody told me about it. Any time
> I have tried to search the app store for something I might find useful I
> come up empty. Often I have one app that does something and works when
> there are several other apps that do the same thing better. I don't
> know how to find them.

you ask a very good question, for both users and app developers. not
only is it tough for users to find out about new apps (unless it's
reported in tech news, which vlc was), but it's also hard for
developers to get their apps noticed. searching within itunes sucks,
and search is marginally better using websites such as appshopper.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
Adrian C <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> On 21/09/2010 17:45, AES wrote:
> > Basic question:
> >
> > Are there any commercial jailbreaking services that can and will,
> > for a modest fee, exercise their skills to customize the operation
> > of owner-supplied examples of the iPod/iTouch/iPad genre of
> > iGadgets? (including removing any iTunes requirements)
> >
>
> Don't understand this. If you exclude *all* elements of the Apple system
> entirely from the device, then there are better hardware alternatives
> (sound quality, camera quality, 'missing' HW/SW interfaces) available on
> other devices. May as well not bought into the system in the first place.

For my purposes, I'm not thinking so much of an iPad-level device --
seems unlikely I'll ever get (or want) one of those. But, I already
have an 8 GB iPod sitting unused in a drawer (gotten as a gift).

Suppose I'm going on a trip on which I can leave my primary computer (a
loaded Mac laptop) at home, since I'll have use of another machine at
the other end. So I'd like to drag-and-drop a number of files from this
laptop onto the iPod at this end, then off at the other end, using
*single-click* USB-style universal-machine drag and drops in both
cases), and similarly drag and drop onto this same iPod some audio files
which I can listen to on the same iPod, on the plane.

What better use for an iPod? -- *if* one could do this.

In article
<siegman-(E-Mail Removed)>, AES
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> Suppose I'm going on a trip on which I can leave my primary computer (a
> loaded Mac laptop) at home, since I'll have use of another machine at
> the other end. So I'd like to drag-and-drop a number of files from this
> laptop onto the iPod at this end, then off at the other end, using
> *single-click* USB-style universal-machine drag and drops in both
> cases), and similarly drag and drop onto this same iPod some audio files
> which I can listen to on the same iPod, on the plane.
>
> What better use for an iPod? -- *if* one could do this.

what do you mean if? ipods support multiple computers with manual sync
for music and videos, and have for quite some time. for some reason,
iphones do not.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
Jeffrey Kaplan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> >
> > > Are there any commercial jailbreaking services that can and will,
> > > for a modest fee, exercise their skills to customize the operation
> > > of owner-supplied examples of the iPod/iTouch/iPad genre of
> > > iGadgets? (including removing any iTunes requirements)
> >
> > Only for iOS devices, which excludes most iPod models.
>
> Oh, so you mean on something like an iPod Classic? Check out Rockbox.
> Depending on which iPod and its generational level, they may have a
> replacement firmware for you that does what you want.

Good point -- I looked into them briefly, some time back. But:

1) At that point I think they were offering, not a jailbreaking service
where they did the installation on my device, for a price; but a
software product, which I wasn't sure I had either the time or the
skills to install myself; and

2) I didn't get the impression that Rockbox allowed simultaneous
flashdrive-style storage of files in arbitrary formats _and_ the playing
of audio files that might be among those stored files.

Have to look again.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, Jeffrey
Kaplan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> > > What better use for an iPod? -- *if* one could do this.
> >
> > what do you mean if? ipods support multiple computers with manual sync
> > for music and videos, and have for quite some time. for some reason,
> > iphones do not.
>
> I think it's the stricter DRM controls on the iOS devices, more
> specifically on the apps. Freewheeling ability to sync would in theory
> allow one person to buy an app, and then give a copy to someone else if
> they could sync their iThing to another computer.

i'm not talking about apps.

you can manually sync an ipod touch with more than one computer for
music and videos but you cannot do that with an iphone, which is
essentially the same device. you can also do it with other ipods, just
not an iphone. it makes no sense but that's what it is. i haven't tried
an ipad though.