iPhone crackers have their priorities mixed up. They’re laboring to unlock iPhone to work on multiple wireless operators’ networks. That’s effort that AT&T and Apple will actively block because it interferes with revenue. Remember that Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T puts money in Apple’s pocket every month for every iPhone subscriber that signs up. If you go taking money out of Apple’s pocket, you should expect to have your effort rendered wasted by a future firmware update.Crackers have discovered that iPhone’s firmware bootloader is locked up tight and will only boot code that’s encrypted against Apple’s private key, and now they’re picking away at an interface to iPhone’s radio chip to work an unlock. I respect the desire for freedom, but I think that some of the guys who are pushing their way into iPhone should be focusing on work that’s of more immediate benefit to iPhone owners and to potential developers. Access to iPhone’s sandboxed file system and adding plug-ins to Safari are more productive goals. That effort would help sell iPhones, and I doubt that it would draw much fire from Apple.There is a precedent for that belief. Apple rolled out Apple TV as a non-user-extensible platform. Apple released no SDK, no technical documentation and no development tools, and informed me in a briefing that Apple would not be supporting custom development on Apple TV. Bummer. Why, I wondered, weren’t developers protesting about being shut out of Apple TV? Mac developers spend no time complaining. When Apple says “no,” they find a way to do it anyway. Apple expects that, and I believe it counts on it. Many outside Apple are as smart and resourceful as the engineers inside Apple, especially when they can work without answering to management and marketing.I wasn’t surprised when early Apple TV users uncovered traces of a mechanism used for enhancing Apple TV through downloadable plug-ins. I wasn’t surprised by hacks, albeit ugly ones, that get Apple TV to boot full OS X (possible, but awfully silly since you end up with a Mac that has 256 MB of RAM). But I underestimated how seriously the Mac developer community would take the mission of opening Apple TV to developers, a goal that I consider worthwhile, and in a way that doesn’t deny Apple any income.There is an independently-authored Apple TV “Back Row” SDK, developed by Alan Quartermain, which comes complete with Xcode templates, sample code, an emulator and tutorials. And in the best Mac tradition, it’s all free and open source. Some of the really useful plug-ins that were built against this SDK are listed on the Awkward TV site, and developers took the time to make them mesh with Apple TV’s UI and its clean, commercial look and feel. I’m not interested in making my Apple TV a Mac, but extending it with additional video codecs and access to content beyond iTunes and YouTube make an investment in Apple TV more worthwhile. There aren’t many who will be willing to go through the process required to get Back Row apps and plug-ins running–you still have to crack Apple TV’s case–but it’s turned out to be a fun device for harmless hacking, and non-hackers who can stomach the risks benefit from the effort. “Harmless” is the operative word. Software Development