On Friday, Peter Hajas, the author of the well-known MobileNotifier iOS tweak, unexpectedly announced on his blog that he’s "taking a break". Yet, many are speculating that there might be other reasons behind his sudden departure.
Although the tweak’s development will continue, in the "capable hands" of Kyle Adams, Tim Novinger and others, many are wondering why Hajas made such a sudden departure while giving so little information as to why he won’t stay on the project anymore or what he’ll be doing in the future:
I can’t say why, but it’s worth it. Trust me. If you look around hard enough, you’ll probably figure it out.
I hope you guys understand, and I look forward to bringing you more awesome, great, free open source software in the future. Stay tuned for some amazing things!
If you absolutely must get in touch with me, send me an email.
Until then, stay hungry and stay foolish.
The Apple rumor mill has gone crazy ever since, trying to grasp the reason for Peter’s secretism. On one hand, he’s a college student, and college students often need to set some time aside for academic work, but on the other hand, why couldn’t he have just said it? And what was that "if you look around hard enough" bit for? That’s what has led many to believe that Hajas might have landed on a job at Apple.
The main factor that pointed to that guess was the blog post’s final sentence, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, an expression coined by Steve Jobs at his Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. Of course, this expression has become incredibly popular among the Apple community ever since, but some still think there’s more to it. Could a Jobs quote actually mean he’s now working for him? A tweet issued by him later that day, stating that the Apple rumor community has "a vivid imagination", only left us more confused.
This is not the first time Apple has recruited people from the jailbreak community. Back in 2007, when the Cupertino company was developing its SDK, it was said to have hired several people to work on an application distribution model. Months later, the App Store was unveiled, which felt, and still does feel, like Installer, the "App Store" that was available on jailbroken phones back then.
The hiring of the author of the main developer of the gold standard in iPhone notifications within the jailbreak community could only mean one thing: Apple’s next notification system might look really close to the current solution for jailbroken phones: a simple panel at the top that shows up whenever any application of service needs your attention, without stopping you from using your phone.
Earlier this year, we took a look at a beta MobileNotifier and were incredibly impressed at the open source tweak’s capabilities. You’re still free to download it from Hajas’ repository:
http://phajas.xen.prgmr.com/repo
Yesterday, we described what we hope to see in iOS 5, and one of the things that we urged for was a better notification system. If Peter Hajas has actually been hired, could this mean the end of the old iPhone push notifications? We sure hope so.
UPDATE 1: According to a tweet posted on May 9th by Peter Hajas himself, he accepted the fact that he has been working at a "fruit" company in California. There’s only one "fruit" company in CA that might be of interest to Hajas, which is the well-known Apple, Inc. It’s confirmed, folks, the developer of MobileNotifier is now working at Apple!
UPDATE 2: Our source in Apple, who asked to remain anonymous, has just sent in this screenshot to confirm that name of Peter Hajas has shown up in Apple Directory System as a iOS & Frameworks employee.
Thank to Tony Balboa for the hat tip!
(via iPhoneinCanada, iPhoneDownloadBlog)
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