Enjoy!

Yes. I know 1.1.4 is available. I’m working on it…but i’ve spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the different techniques for a smooth 1.1.3 jailbreak on Windows and this seems to be the best by far. This article explains the easiest step i’ve found yet for jailbreaking your 1.1.3 iTouch.

This article is now obsolete.  If you want to jailbreak your iTouch on WIndows, then you should click on the following article for the most up-to-date method of jailbreaking.

http://abwaters.com/2008/04/15/jailbreaking-114-itouch-on-windows-in-1-simple-step/

To start, you will need to have a jailbroken 1.1.1 (or 1.1.2) iTouch. If you’ve been to this site before, you know that you can follow the steps in this article to downgrade or jailbreak an iTouch running 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 (yes…i’ve tried it and it works to downgrade from 1.1.4 as well).

Ok. Now for the good stuff! If you followed the steps of the previous article, you will have a 1.1.1 jailbroken iTouch and you know that there isn’t much you can do with it…all the good stuff is available for 1.1.3 or higher.

First, go to the Installer and install System->BSD Subsystem. Once that is installed you should select the Update button in the Installer to make sure everything is updated.

Before we go to the next step, make sure you know how to restart your iTouch. To do this you select and hold the “Sleep” button until you get the “Slide to Power Off” message. By the way, the manual for the iTouch is located here if you need a refresher on the more esoteric features of your iTouch. And…more importantly, go to settings and make sure you turn off the Auto-Lock feature by setting it to Never.

Now run the Installer and select Sources and press the Edit button then press the Add button. You will be prompted for a URL for another repository source. Enter http://ijailbreak.com/repo.plist and select OK. If you’ve done this correctly, you will see a new category called iJailBreakMobile in the Install screen of the Installer. If you do not see this category, then you very likely have mistyped the URL above. Go back to sources and try not to fumble finger it this time.

The next step does all the work and takes quite a bit of time. Go to the iJailBreakMobile category and select “iJailBreakMobile 1.1.1″ and press the Install button. Now go back to your home screen on your iTouch and you will see a new icon called iJailBreak. Press this and then put your iTouch somewhere safe and let it run. Since the script will download the 1.1.3 firmware and install it, this takes some time so your iTouch should be well charged or plugged in to a USB port while it is running the upgrade. If you don’t see a script running after the above step is complete then you missed a step somewhere or you didn’t start with a clean jailbroken 1.1.1 iTouch. Start over and try again.

Once the upgrade is done, you will be on 1.1.3 but you have some more steps to do. Go back to the Installer and select the iJailBreakMobile category again and install “iPod Touch Software Upgrade”. This installs a new icon called iJailbreak that looks just like the upgrade icon we just ran. Run this and it will install the cool new apps and the ability to rearrange your device home screen by pressing and holding an icon until it starts wiggling. Reboot for good measure here…

Now to cleanup after yourself. Go back to the Installer, back to iJailBreakMobile and install the “Remove 1.1.3 Upgrade Data. After this is done, you are now fully upgraded to 1.1.3 and you can install the latest version of Summerboard and all the cool Summerboard themes. I’ll post some screenshots to Flickr later today.

This feature alone was worth the effort to do the upgrade!

But it seems obvious to me that there is some risk in doing this. In fact, I made a point in my post of how nervous I was in the beginning. The bottom line is that you assume the risk when you do something like this…but honestly, the risk is not that high. The iTunes sync interface allows you to “Update” and “Restore” your iTouch (iPod, iPhone…whatever). What is not obvious is that you can also backup your iTouch. So here you go.

On Windows, you can go to the device sync screen below:

On this screen, the Restore button is what you would use to restore your device back to the most recent firmware upgrade. At worst case, this will erase all the music you have sync’ed and remove any other settings you may have changed and set your device back to a default configuration. This is not all that bad as an option for those of you who didn’t do a backup before you tried breaking your iTouch out of jail!

But…if you want to save yourself even the time involved in recreating settings and resynching your music, then try Ctl-Clicking on the restore button. You will get a dialog like the following that gives you the option to do a backup of your device and your settings before you restore the firmware.

So backup up your device! Try jail-breaking it…turn it into a brick a couple of times, restore it. Take a deep breath because were sure just a few minutes ago that you would never see your iTouch again. Then…start the entire process over again! And just remember…i’m not making you do this! But…good luck anyway!

This article is now obsolete.  If you want to jailbreak your iTouch on WIndows, then you should click on the following article for the most up-to-date method of jailbreaking.

http://abwaters.com/2008/04/15/jailbreaking-114-itouch-on-windows-in-1-simple-step/

The thing that caused me to dive into this was an application called PocketGuitar. The GUI on PocketGuitar is extremely simple. It is simply a grid that you quickly understand corresponds to the strings and frets on a virtual guitar but the sounds created by this application are amazing and very compelling. My daughter actually pressured me into installing this application for her on her iTouch.

First, my worries about permanently destroying the device were unfounded. The iTouch can be restored fairly easily just using the normal “Restore” feature built into the iTunes software. So after trying and retrying and googling and re-googling, I realized that before I could jailbreak the device I had to restore it back to an earlier version of the firmware. In fact, it turns out that the real work in jailbreaking the device was getting from my current 1.1.3 firmware back to the 1.1.1 firmware.

1) The first thing you need to do is obtain a copy of the 150mb firmware restore file which you can download here. For me the tough part of this was that different sites give you different instructions on how to restore this. A large number of the sites tell you that you can simply run iTunes and restore the file by holding the “Shift” key and click the “Restore” button on the iPod Summary screen. Others tell you that the iTouch needs to be in “Recovery” mode where the device has an iTunes icon and a USB cord on its display indicating it needs to be repaired. I tried these methods for about an hour and was unsuccessful. It seems that something in the iTunes software (i’m running 7.6) or in the 1.1.3 firmware is dead-set on keeping you from downgrading. So I finally starting watching YouTube and came across a video by a YouTuber who seems very young to me and was nearly incomprehensible in his directions but gave me the keys that I needed to finish downgrading to 1.1.1. There is a kit called “AutoDown” that you can obtain here that helped me reset my iTouch to a point where the Shift-Restore sequence from iTunes would actually work.

Basically, you close iTunes, open Task manager (Ctl-Alt-Del on most Windows systems) and kill iTunesHelper.exe. Note that your iTouch should still be connected by USB when you first close iTunes. Now unzip autodown.zip and run the AutoDown batch file which will repeat the instructions on close iTunesHelper and then ask you to press Enter a couple of times. After executing some commands on your iTouch the software will eventually stop without warning. After this happens, run iTunes again, hold Shift and click Restore on the iTouch/iPod Summary page. Select the ipsw file that you downloaded earlier (iPod1,1_1.1.1_3A110a_Restore.ipsw) and start the restore. I had performed this step a dozen times with slightly different variations but wasn’t successful until I ran AutoDown first. Now for the Jailbreak.

2) You know…in the movies, the jail break is usually the dramatic part of the process. In this case, after the downgrade, you simply go to http://jailbreakme.com using the Safari browser on your iTouch. When the page appears, scroll to the bottom and select the “Install AppSnapp” link. After various gyrations, the iTouch will lock itself. When you unlock it, an Installer icon should be present on your iTouch. Select this icon and browse the 3rd party apps to install…PocketGuitar was one of these…2 hours later and my daughter has everything she needs to get in trouble in school tomorrow…but she’s happy and she thinks her dad is a hero…today anyway

Yes, I know I said 2 steps…the first step (the downgrade) took me about 1 hour and a half.  The second step took about 2 minutes.  Hopefully, this article will save you at least a hour of time trying to accomplish the same thing.   Unless of course, you already spent the hour before you found this article

Since all evidence points to the PocketGuitar application only working on 1.1.1 (jailbroken of course), she can’t upgrade to the latest firmware but that doesn’t seem to be a big issue for now.

Apple…please release the SDK and allow your customers to take advantage of the creativity, talent and sheer persistence of the Open Source community. Most of the software that is available is very good and some of it is brilliant!

Good luck!

And now, for the moment we’ve all been waiting for…well, the moment, i’ve been waiting for anyway…

Steve Jobs: “Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.”

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