Salvatore Iovene

Dear Mr. Jobs,

Although I’m just a spo­radic Apple user (used to have an iBook — but even­tu­ally sold it -, I have an iPod Nano), and although I’m not using any of your soft­ware (used Linux on the iBook and use Linux again on the iPod), I truly appre­ci­ate the prod­ucts of Apple Inc., soft­ware included. I like OS X very much and I’ve been very keen in fol­low­ing Apple’s events even not being a great user myself.

I heard about the iPhone, saw the pic­tures and heard the rumors. At first glance, fol­low­ing the offi­cial pre­sen­ta­tion through Engadget’s web­site, I was stunned and greatly sur­prised, in a very good way. The iPhone looked exactly like every­thing I’ve always wanted. All the ideas in there, all what that kind of gad­get rep­re­sents, have been uncon­sciously float­ing in the back­yard of my mind for some time, and sud­denly all was true.

After a few days, though, some rumors said that the user won’t be allowed to install 3rd party appli­ca­tions. That shocked me again: the first thing I thought, when I saw the iPhone, was “Oh gee, this is the ulti­mate geek tool, must have it!”. In the line of Apple’s gor­geous designs, with a great soft­ware load, and fun­da­men­tally a BSD sys­tem where I could load any­thing I wanted. I was already dream­ing of port­ing my favorite appli­ca­tions to the iPhone. Then the rumor. I’m no well known mar­keter, but some­thing has been bug­ging me. In my hum­ble opin­ion, the iPhone is (or should be) basi­cally two great things, that rep­re­sent great inno­va­tion if merged in the same device. One is the sim­plic­ity of use, which Apple is famous for. The clean and neat usabil­ity, I loved it in OS X, loved it in the iPod soft­ware. That fea­ture, as usual, hits the great­est share of the mar­ket. Mil­lions of peo­ple who want some­thing that just works, and is easy to under­stand. Apple is always been great with that. The sec­ond thing is that such a gad­get undoubt­edly attracts the power user: a sin­gle device which is a beau­ti­ful phone and has the capa­bil­i­ties of get­ting to the net through WIFI. I think I’m not the only one, out there, who wished for such device. The Nokia 770 was a good start, but it wasn’t a phone. Now, there is some­thing that we power users, or geeks, if you pre­fer (I don’t mind), like to do: that is tweak, cus­tomize. Hav­ing such a pos­si­bil­ity with the iPhone would, in my opin­ion, gain an extra share of the mar­ket, i.e. those power users that don’t like the idea of being con­strained in any way.

I surely under­stand that Apple’s design­ers and engi­neers know what they are doing, and there are very good rea­sons not to open the iPhone to exter­nal appli­ca­tions. A lot has been said, around, about the risks of releas­ing a devel­op­ment plat­form, or the threats that this would bring to the mobile oper­a­tors (like Cin­gu­lar), even though, I must admit, none of the arti­cles got tech­ni­cal enough to con­vince me. And I’ll be up to take all of this as true, of course. There is, though, some­thing which I, and a lot of other peo­ple, would really appre­ci­ate in a device like the iPhone. That is a Ter­mi­nal pro­gram with an SSH client. Imag­ine the poten­tial­i­ties: I do most of my things through an SSH con­nec­tion to my machine at the office. I work from home or from any­where else in the World, that way. I use IRC that way, I read my Usenet mes­sages that way. I read my emails that way. What’s the advan­tage of all this? I like to have a cen­tral and safe place where I can keep an orga­nized and, above all, cen­tral­ized way of man­ag­ing my resources. I don’t need to con­fig­ure email clients every­where I go. I don’t need sev­eral web­mail sys­tems to check all my email addresses. I keep my Usenet arti­cle orga­nized and syn­chro­nized on one sin­gle machine. I keep all my IRC logs on one machine, and so on. With an SSH client in the iPhone, I could do all this even from a bus, now that in my city wire­less con­nec­tions are becom­ing avail­able on some buses.

I’m sure there are lots of more uses of such a thing, and lit­er­ally tens of thou­sands, if not more, of power users like me will love it. I really hope that you will con­sider this issue, and give us power user an SSH client for the iPhone, or the pos­si­bil­ity of installing cus­tom software.