The Apple Wiki:Community portal

iPhone-Elite
I think we should include all this old stuff before it gets lost: code.google.com/p/iphone-elite/. I mean the wiki articles there. Most infos should be already here, but I'm sure a lot of things are missing too. --http 15:02, 26 June 2012 (MDT)

Boot-args cleanup
We need to clean up the boot-args pages. First the technical part: What I understand is that iBoot loads the kernel. And when loading it, it can pass some parameters to select certain behavior. So this only works with an iBoot or bootrom exploit. I understand that in earlier firmware versions there was simply an iBoot variable, but that doesn't exist or work anymore, now passing theses args requires a different or patched iBoot. There are various parameters in different kernel versions. The description for these arguments is scattered over various places: So what do we want to do about this mess? I suggest to move the current Kernel content to the redirect page Boot arguments (or to another new page, maybe boot-args). The current content of Boot-args (iBoot variable) and all other content should get merged into there. Then change all references to this new page and on the Kernel page write just something short with "main article there". What do you think? --http (talk) 21:31, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Kernel A section with the latest boot arguments list. This should be a short introduction and having a link "main article".
 * Boot-args (iBoot variable) separate page for boot arguments, but mainly for the iBoot variable that doesn't exist any longer
 * [ Boot arguments] (redirect)
 * Talk:Restore_Mode describing the iBoot variable problem
 * Various pages referencing boot-args, like Research: Re-allowing unsigned ramdisks and boot-args with the 2.* iBoot (here we should have a link on the second title)
 * My earlier comment Talk:Kernel
 * This comment here.
 * I like Boot Arguments. --5urd (talk) 02:01, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * One addition: Maybe we should use boot-args as the main page, because all links are written like that. --http (talk) 07:37, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Orphaned articles
This is an interesting search: Special:LonelyPages - "The following pages are not linked from or transcluded into other pages in The iPhone Wiki." I'm not sure where all of those articles should be linked, but figuring that out could be a useful project for somebody. Britta (talk) 05:57, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Easy tasks for new editors

 * Finish converting the remaining error codes listed here MobileDevice_Library into the proper mach_return_t codes they should be displayed as. (convert the negative number listed into hex, strip any leading "FF" so it should be in the format "0xe80000" followed by two numbers) --Dirkg (talk) 22:40, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Login prompt revision suggestion
I wrote a suggestion here: MediaWiki talk:Loginprompt (since I don't have permission to edit MediaWiki:Loginprompt directly) - I'd be interested in whether it sounds like a good idea to other people. Britta (talk) 01:00, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Homepage suggestions
Under "Application Development", what about linking to iPhoneDevWiki? It's also a community-edited technical resource, and it links to this wiki. It could be helpful to add a little more detail to "Get up to speed in the community.", like this: "Get up to speed in the community - learn about how jailbreaks work." Under "Definitions", it could be helpful to list all the firmware tags in one line or sub-list, similar to how Jailbreak is organized next to Tethered jailbreak and Untethered jailbreak, both to save space and help readers understand the list. --Britta (talk) 23:01, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
 * A link to the iPhoneDevWiki sounds good. I wonder if we should have an "External Links" or "Other Resources" section to include links to other sites (such as the iPhone Dev Team blog) though. As for the "Up to Speed" page, I feel like the entire page could be reworked a bit— and perhaps even receive a new, clearer name (Introduction? Preface? Or something else?)— the current name makes it sound like it's for people that last paid attention to jailbreaking when the App Store didn't exist. And yeah, moving the IMG3 tags to a sub-list sounds like a really good idea. (Admittedly, I actually don't care for its inclusion in the first place, but that's just a personal preference.) --Dialexio (talk) 00:10, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * There's already Useful Links with some links to other core community resources (which could be updated and rearranged) - I was just thinking that it'd be especially useful to link to iPhoneDevWiki prominently since it's likely for TheiPhoneWiki visitors to also be interested in relatively-organized technical information about development. Changing the name of "Up to Speed" sounds fine to me too - that page didn't get much attention since 2008 until I sort of commandeered it to serve as an "intro to jailbreaking" page. :) It could be renamed "getting started", as in "how to get started on learning about research into iOS devices, especially security research (such as jailbreaks)". Britta (talk) 00:31, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Also I'd love to see a dedicated section for "Good tasks for new editors", where we could maintain a list of relatively easy/straightforward suggested edits that wouldn't require vast technical knowledge, like updating that links page. Where would that go? Add it as a sub-section of The iPhone Wiki:Current events and link that section from the homepage or something? Or make a new page? Britta (talk) 00:40, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

What is 0x5265c384 in the boot process?
Does anybody know where  points to in the boot process? I haven't been able to find anything on it. --Ph0enix (talk) 20:14, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

License for contributions
This wiki has never had an official license for contributions. Now, IANAL, but IIRC, this means that you can't use anything posted here unless it qualifies as fair-use. What I propose is that we set a license and add a notice that states that any contributions after a set date are to be licensed under that license (that's kindof a mouthful). I think we should use the CC-by-SA 3.0 as Wikipedia uses it, but that's just me. Any ideas? --5urd (talk) 19:53, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, the edit info already says all this:

Please note that all contributions to The iPhone Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see The iPhone Wiki:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! For me, that's enough. I don't need a 50 page license. But if you want to formalize this more, go ahead. --http (talk) 20:35, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. It's good practice to have an official license, just in case any disputes happen someday, and to ensure that it's OK to copy text over to Wikipedia (for example). Britta (talk) 21:32, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Banner Replacement?
I kinda feel like the banner on the front page is getting a little stale, so I'm interested in seeing it replaced. I tossed a proposal on Twitter a couple of days ago (which is admittedly plain, but Myriad Set…), but I haven't heard any opinions on replacing the banner. Are there any thoughts on this matter? --Dialexio (talk) 17:42, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Or, this. --iAdam1n (talk) 18:22, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Looks nice in Myriad! More professional. Britta (talk) 04:01, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Date Format
I see that iAdam1n started to unify the date formats in this wiki. While I like this to be consistent, actually we should've talked about what format to use before changing it. I like the d_mon_yyyy format though. I also saw that he removed the  between the date parts on the iFaith page that I added once purposefully. The reason was that when making the browser window small (or on the iPhone) that the date wraps to two lines, which is almost always undesired. The question is if we should do that everywhere too? Additionally, as we now seem to have a "standard" here, we should document it, so that new users know what format to use. -- http (talk) 17:42, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I just made it consistent. If you want the  back, feel free to add it. I removed it as it did nothing (previewing on OS X). We should use the format I used throughout the wiki and not Dec 23, 2013 etc. --iAdam1n (talk) 18:32, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * stands for "non-breaking space". It is essentially a space, but with a property that prevents word wrap from occurring between the two words it's between. Look at Firmware Keys on a small enough screen (1024 across should do it). Your browser should preserve the space between the date "words". Now, go into the edit page and remove the  from everything in one table. Your browser will now word wrap the date "words". --5urd (talk) 00:04, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * What I actually want to do is use  instead of plain dates in areas where dates are used as a statistic; for example, Firmware, Firmware Keys, SHSH, Timeline, etc. Places where dates are used to record when something happened, for example on evasi0n7, "On 28 December 2013...", should use the date flat out in the source. --5urd (talk) 00:04, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Template documentation
Whenever using templates that are copied here from Wikipedia, I almost always forget the parameters of the template. I then have to open Wikipedia and search for the template. What I want to do it copy the template documentation from Wikipedia here. To work around the licensing issue, we can create our own template that you would include at the bottom of the copied documentation that says the documentation comes from Wikipedia (because Wikipedia uses CC-BY-SA 3.0 which says our copied text must be under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and attribute Wikipedia and her editors. I can write the text for license template. Any ideas? Any opposition? If not, I'll begin in a few days. --5urd (talk) 00:04, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't see why not. That's what I've seen done on other wikis. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  16:56, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Category Security Researchers
Hi all! i've created the category Security Researchers in order to cut down on the pages categorized as hackers as it apparently needs to be more exclusive. i've been adding the less known or inactive hackers from the hacker page but have not removed them from the hackers page. I feel that it should be a vote on who gets removed from the hackers page so my first suggestion is User:Fallensn0w‎ as he has been inactive for a very long time and didn't do a lot in the first place. --Ph0enix (talk) 15:57, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Email notifications?
Is it possible to get emailed when a watchlist page changes? I'd love that feature. This looks relevant. --beej (talk) 08:02, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Ambiguous names
I feel like the names for Symlinks and Symbolic Link Vulnerability is a bit too ambiguous. Now, I don't anticipate there being much confusion, particularly since nobody really cares about 1.x anymore, but I would like to make the distinction clearer. I think both articles should be renamed, but I have no idea on what to rename them to (or even if you guys approve). I thought of using the CVE ID, but Apple doesn't provide one for Symlinks (or even any indication that they fixed it). (Symbolic Link Vulnerability was assigned CVE-2013-5133.) --Dialexio (talk) 17:51, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * They are referred to as the Symbolic Link by people like MuscleNerd and iH8sn0w so, in my opinion, they should be kept as their current names. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  18:06, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't mind if one of them keeps their current name, but there should be something to make the distinction clearer. --Dialexio (talk) 01:13, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

IRC Channel on Freenode
Howdy iphonewiki folks, I have #theiphonewiki registered on freenode, and am ready to have people come in (it's been ages since this idea has been brought up). Shall we open it? I'd like to get some ops in there to help out. --Haifisch (talk) 05:48, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I think we should make an IRC channel for this wiki. It can be either #theiphonewiki or #iphonewiki on freenode. The channel would be used for discussions, such as the TLC of the Jailbreak page for example. It would make getting things sorted a lot easier, since we could just ping each other different ideas. I know this idea was made before, but the channel never really got anywhere. What do you guys think of this idea? We would need to decide who has founder, op and voice etc. on the channel here. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  06:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * This is idiotic. You just want to do it yourself cause you want power. We won't help you feed your ego. --goeo_ (talk) 19:43, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * You have never edited on this wiki in your life before so STFU. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  05:48, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Being that I own #theiphonewiki, the original channel in which the wiki's channel was going to be on, I have control over who's moderating the channel. One op will be me, I have 3+ years of IRC moderation experience (To be honest, Is this even CV worthy? :P) we can choose the other operators when the channel becomes somewhat popular. ps. Why make two topics for this? --Haifisch (talk) 08:03, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * That most definitely is CV worthy. I've seen Spydar007 moderate a channel, it crashed in a week or so. Not to mention the channel wasn't even his, and he kinda took it over anyway. --goeo_ (talk) 19:43, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * No, no, no. The community decides. Juts because Farahtwiggy asked you to register it before, doesn't mean you get to be an op there now. This was my idea (Dialexio can vouch). You have no control over who are ops there.
 * One "no" is enough. Farah, really, doesn't have much (if anything) to do with this, the channel was registered a year ago. Your childish response above does not show me that you can handle owning the channel, nor do the rumors of you abusing channel control in your personal channel. It's really not your idea, it may have just now come to your mind, but adaminsull and I have gone through this whole deal before (one year ago). Join me on #theiphonewiki if you'd like to chat this out. --Haifisch (talk) 08:22, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know what's happening off of the wiki so I might only have part of the picture. I definitely don't see Haifisch as trying to steal credit for this idea, which actually was brought up about ages ago. I'm not much of an IRC guy, so my opinion might not have that much weight for a lot of this discussion, but I feel that the channel would be better in Haifisch's hands given his experience. Ownership/management/whatever for the IRC channel should certainly be open for discussion though. I really don't care too much about whoever gets to run it, as long as the person is someone that the community knows, respects, and trusts. (Same goes for the channel ops.) --Dialexio (talk) 17:42, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It does not sound like a good idea to have an IRC channel for this wiki. It is useful for discussion of this wiki's articles to continue to be be done publicly on the wiki (on the appropriate talk pages), so that everyone interested in the wiki can easily contribute to the discussion, and so that there is a well-organized public record of discussions that we can all easily refer to. IRC channels are also very fertile breeding grounds for social conflicts and unhappiness (as we've seen already), which is helpful to skip. In any case, this should be discussed at The iPhone Wiki:Community portal instead of here - this page is for discussing modifications to the Main Page, and that one is for general discussions about TheiPhoneWiki. Britta (talk) 09:46, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Moving to Canada
I'm moving this server in the next few days to a quality server in Canada. It'll be running inside a VM, so I'll also look into giving admins more access. Hopefully the periodic outages will stop. Maybe I'll add some SSL certs. --geohot (talk)
 * Nice, thanks! HTTPS would be great. --Britta (talk) 21:08, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * So we're not in canada yet?--Awesomebing1 (talk) 20:32, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

You should all be in Canada now, with 8 GiB of Canadian RAM. We also have HTTPS, but it avoids the Squid proxy. It's fine for people making edits but I don't plan on changing the default anytime soon. --geohot (talk) 04:43, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Yay! Thanks as always George! Any plans on adding back SSH? There's a few things I'd love to have done. --5urd (talk) 21:40, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks geohot! Hopefully now there will be less downtime ;p --iAdam1n (talk) 07:41, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Sweeeeeeeet. :D --Dialexio (talk) 15:16, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

iPhone serial cable
Could somebody document how to use uart cable (i.e. setup, bitrate, ...) ? Some intructions are available at instructables. Can two iPhones' serial inputs be connected to each other (i.e. TX of 1st iPhone to RX of 2nd and RX of first to TX of second) and minicom used on one of them to connect to /dev/uart.iap such that no USB to 3.3V TTL (FT232RL in the link) would be needed provided that you already have multiple iDevices with dock connector

Bringing this topic back up, I've developed an open source package for iPhone (30pin) serial that doesn't used the PodBreakout that has been discontinued for a while now. Would it be alright to document how to setup/use the boards here? I'm just unsure if this is the appropriate place for it. --Haifisch (talk) 03:45, 2 May 2015 (UTC)


 * User:Haifisch, that sounds fine to me - it's iPhone-related, which is the the theme of this wiki. Britta (talk) 09:53, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Original iPad mini name
Seeing as we use (at least mostly) "iPhone" instead of "iPhone 2G" and "iPod touch" instead of "iPod touch 1G", I feel we should change how we reference the original iPad mini. The reason for adding the "1G" was because of the name conflict between pages. But we could probably fix that by moving iPad mini 1G to, say, iPad mini (first generation). --5urd (talk) 03:04, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me. "iPad mini (1st generation)" is fine, but for the sake of length I would go with either "iPad mini" or "iPad mini 1." --Dialexio (talk) 03:27, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Agreed. "iPad mini" would follow the other 1st generation devices page. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  04:56, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I also think this is a good idea because of how Apple is listing it like that too. I would say use "iPad mini". Another thought I did have is that it might confuse people with iPad mini and making them think that it is the page to list all the mini's. To correct this, I would suggest iPad mini (1st Generation) and roll that out across iPod touch, iPad and iPhone too. Just thought I'd put that out there to see what others think. --iAdam1n (talk) 10:14, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I feel "iPad mini (1st Generation)" is too long. "iPad mini" is fine IMO. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  05:30, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Except that "iPad mini" already exists. It's the overview page for the iPad mini, just as iPad is for iPads, iPhone for iPhones, and iPod touch for iPod touches. --5urd (talk) 20:06, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * If we do this, I suggest doing it for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch too. --iAdam1n (talk) 20:43, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I disagree. I like the usage of "iPod touch 2G", "iPod touch 3G", etc. Sure, drop the "1G" from the original iPad and iPod touch (and "2G" from the original iPhone), but don't change anything else. Unless we can come up with something other than "iPad mini (1st generation)", we should use that though. However, I don't like that title as it would look inconsistent with other devices. Wikipedia uses the parentheses to separate pages that would have the same name, but are about different topics. --5urd (talk) 22:06, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The only problem is that we can't use iPad mini for it's current purpose and the first generation. I would also suggest anything that is changed would be consistent throughout all of the devices. That is why I liked the iPad mini (1st generation) idea but then again, would not be good if it is not like that for all devices. I like iPad mini (1st generation) because it is how Wikipedia lists it and to be honest, it avoids confusion. There is one other idea I can think of but not sure I even like it that much, iPad mini (original). This again should be for iPad, iPod touch and iPhone if we do this. --iAdam1n (talk) 22:35, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Mobile Stylesheet
I was thinking recently, if geohot agrees to accept it, that I could make a mobile.css file in order to attempt to make a few changes to the site on mobile. This would make it so that it would not be so ugly and if possible, the text might be easier to read. What would everyone think about this? For one thing, I'd like to mobile the "Log out" off the black part of the screen and put it near the "Contributions" button or thereabout. --iAdam1n (talk) 10:37, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Instead of a mobile stylesheet to hack up the skin more (like the  and   skins do), I would create a whole new skin. I could write the PHP and JavaScript, and you can write the CSS. --5urd (talk) 17:04, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
 * If you mean a skin just for mobile, that would be ok but not sure how you could make it selectable with a mobile device but not on desktop. If you could do this, it could work but personally I think a mobile.css would be easier since it has to be previewed in the iOS simulator (that's the way I do it). I couldn't say I'd edit a page without being an admin (unless it's made that I could). --iAdam1n (talk) 17:35, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I was going to mention that MediaWiki includes a sorta-mobile theme called Chick, but it seems that's long gone. MW's changed a lot since I used it, but the way it worked was it subclassed MonoBook (so there was no need to duplicate the HTML template) and swapped its CSS for its own (screenshot). Come to think of it, whoa, I even wrote my own skin called iWiki. Was never updated for MW 1.17, which made breaking changes to the skin API. I probably won't have the time to update it, but maybe someone else could? kirb (talk) 09:01, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I think this is a great idea, since this is actually a wiki about mobiles. No idea why it hasn't been done already. —  Spydar007  (Talk)  15:17, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
 * There is a mobile pluggin for Media Wiki that will make it look very nice MWoolweaver (talk) 07:22, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I completed this a while ago but forgot to comment about it. If anyone has any improvement requests, feel free to list them and I'll take a look. --iAdam1n (talk) 11:07, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Apple Watch
I've added the Apple Watch using that page to most devices. I was thinking this morning that it should be moved to Apple Watch 1G an have Apple Watch as a page like iPhone etc but then thought that I'd wait to see if there is a second generation some time and if there is, move it then. What does everyone think? I don't mind either way but wanted others opinions. --iAdam1n (talk) 11:07, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Bite-sized editing tasks
It seems fun to make a list of relatively easy useful edits that new editors can do who are interested in helping, maybe at The iPhone Wiki:Bite-sized editing tasks or a similar page, and link it from the homepage here. I'd include the following as a start:


 * Look at the list at Special:LonelyPages and figure out whether some of those pages should be linked within other pages on the wiki, and then go link them.
 * Check the links at Useful Links and remove broken/outdated sites and add relevant new sites (but don't spam your own stuff).
 * The iOS version table at SHSH should be listed in reverse-chronological order, with newest versions first instead of oldest versions first.
 * If you run into a scam site, add it to the table at Scam Jailbreaks and Unlocks.
 * If you're reading an article and some part of it is confusing to you, post a message on the "talk" page (click the "Discussion" tab at the top of the article) explaining your question or what you found confusing, so that other editors can use this as a suggestion for improving the article.

Ideas? Opinions? Britta (talk) 09:31, 14 May 2015 (UTC)