Wired News: iPod Is A Hacker's Heaven

by , 4:30 PM EDT, April 8th, 2002

What's the hottest thing to hack these days? According to a Wired News article titled IPod [sic]: Music to Hackers' Ears, the iPod gets the nod from the hacking world. It seems that many coders like the iPod and want it to do more than play music and list phone numbers. From the article:

In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages.

The iPod, which must be the hottest gadget on the planet, has also been made to work with Windows. It's supposed to be Mac-only, but EphPod is a free program that allows iPods to connect to Windows machines; Mediafour's Xplay, currently in beta, is a commercial program that does the same thing. Griffin Technology recently developed the PodMate , which allows the iPod to function as a TV remote control by plugging a small infrared unit into the headphone jack. Griffin was planning to sell it, but withdrew it from the market at Apple's request.

An enterprising Japanese hacker has even made a boom box out of an iPod.

There's even a 14 year old who wrote a hack so that the iPod can show Internet based news headlines. The full article is a very good read.

The Mac Observer Spin:

When the iPod first appeared, many of our more forward thinking readers imagined that Apple was hinting at a possible future product line that featured the iPod as just the starting point of an entire system. Whether Apple has had such a system in mind remains to be seen, but it is obvious that coders with time on their hands have found the iPod a fertile platform, and it seems that Apple benefits. Some of our staff have insisted that the iPod is just an MP3 player, a great MP3 player, but an MP3 player nontheless. We think these coders have proven that there's more to the iPod than MP3s, and we salute them.

IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears