Welcome to my Developer Blog

I thought it would be good to start this developer blog with some photos of how my iOS development began. At university during my Ph.D. I had been building .NET Compact Framework apps in C# for Pocket PCs, usually on iPaqs with GPS sleeves and using Wi-Fi.

A bunch of iPaqs and I – 5th July 2004

Then in 2007 the iPhone came out. That summer, during my job at Microsoft as a lowly intern we bought iPhones for “research”.

Me at Microsoft – 25th July 2007

Given it was initially a US only product and SIM locked to AT&T I followed Geohot’s live blog on jailbreaking for purposes of SIM unlocking. We used Microsoft’s micro-soldering equipment to attach the wires for the hardware jailbreak, then performed the SIM unlock and then I could begin using the iPhone on a network the UK, must have been one of the first!

My first iPhone open with the jailbreaking wires attached – 25th August 2007

Microsoft was a fantastic experience but I also learned that I never wanted to work at a corporation again. So from there I began reverse engineering the frameworks and building custom apps and even distributing them via Installer that was released that same summer, and then the following year, Cydia. My first jailbreak apps were primarily around Wi-Fi scanning – my own app WiFiFoFum and a Wi-Fi positioning system for Navizon. Apple picked up on this jailbreak app phenomenon and subsequently released their public SDK and App Store, at which point WiFiFoFum was almost already to go and was one of the first apps in the store. Everything was going great with thousands of sales per day until unfortunately Apple decided to ban it for using private APIs. They still to this day do not allow Wi-Fi scanners in the store.

Since then I have been perfecting my skills, researching everything about iOS, Macs, Cocoa and Objective-C, learning all the new technologies as they become available. I develop my own apps and ones for academic research projects and the odd bit of consultancy. I’m still very interested in Wi-Fi but more recently I have developed an interest in realtime syncing of information between devices and apps for health. Hopefully you will find any information on this blog useful.