IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears
Source: Wired.com
Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple's iPod digital music player.
Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music.
So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod's small screen.
It's quite an achievement, especially for a young teen. And although PodNews is fairly limited -- it displays only headlines, and from just four websites -- it illustrates the widespread hacker effort that is rapidly turning the iPod into a general-purpose organizer.
Lanctôt-David is just one of dozens of hackers around the world to get the iPod to do more than just play music.
In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages.
