Installer 4.0 News for iPhone 2.0 and 3G - Faster, Smarter
By Aaron Besson at 14 July, 2008, 5:18 pm
The new iPhone and iPod Touch firmware 2.0 brought allot of new features and improvements. One of the being the AppStore. It’s a marvelous place, it already has over 800 apps listed and Apple has re-opened it’s doors to developers so we can expect hundreds of more to flood the AppStore soon.
Apple sold over one million iPhone 3G’s over the weekend it was launched and iPhone and iPod Touch users running firmware 2.0 have downloaded over ten million apps from the AppStore. Those are amazing numbers considering that it has not even been a week since the iPhone 3G and 2.0 with the AppStore have been available.
But what about Installer, the old HackStore? As we know Apple is certainly not going to let apps like Kate, Intelliscreen, OpenSSH, Terminal, MobileFinder and others run on the iPhone or be sold on the AppStore, so we need out resource to get out apps.
Unfortunately, it was discovered early on with the iPhone 2.0 Betas that the old Installer wasn’t going to work, and like any old faithful, she needed a little restoration and modifying to work smoothly on the new 2.0 firmware. What better time than now to put a fresh new look on Installer and modify it to be faster and more user friendly, and of course also work on iPhone and iPod Touch firmware 2.0.
Rip-Dev teamed up with Nullriver a few months ago to give a much needed update to Installer. They added a much needed Search feature, single repo refreshing, soft rebooting installs updates and springboard uninstalls. All very needed features, but installer still had a couple major problems, it was sometimes very slow to open and refresh apps and apps were sometimes not clearly identified as to which firmwares they were compatible with.
Installer 3.1 Update tried to make the start up and refreshing times faster by changing from the plain XML (.xml repo files) to a binary format property list files (.plist repo files) - the .plist format takes up less space on your iPhone and loads and saves faster. But still this was an improvement, but not a solution.
“The new repository format solves both issues. First, it downloads much more compact packages listing from the server, resulting in over than 3 times less bandwidth. And second, the script behind the repository is smart enough to filter the packages based on the firmware version you’re using and only give you the packages that can be installed there. Nice, isn’t it?”
Installer 4 uses sqlite database for all it’s indexing and searching, the entire index is not loaded in iPhones Memory (RAM) and is only accessed on demand (if you are on 1.1.4, you’ll only download 1.1.4 apps for example). Starting up Installer should be significantly faster and the user experience should be better.
The new installer will come out immediately following the release of the PWNAGE Tool jailbreak for 2.0 from the Dev Team, but a hint of when that may be is seen here:
“And to answer a common question, we’re getting there with the release - tomorrow the Installer may hit the private beta, depending on how well the work progresses.”
hmmm…
A few new added features that I think we all would really appreciate:
First, we have added dependencies. This means that if a particular package requires, say, Jiggy Runtime, when you try to install it, the Jiggy Runtime will be installed too (if available). If it is not available, tough luck, you will not be able to install the package - but this is for your own safety. We really don’t want to support the mess on your iPhone (or iPod touch) so Installer will make sure you got everything installed correctly.
And second, the Installer is fully multithreaded now. Which means, sources refresh, package installation can now go in parallel (and in the background), so you don’t have to stare down that progress bar at the bottom of the screen). Moreover, you can now cancel any of the tasks.
Both of these are features that I personally have always missed, I only hope that before it installs an app because the one you select depends on it, it atleast prompts you, so you can avoid app clashes.
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