Saturday, May 28, 2011

Could the Developer of MobileNotifier Be Working with Apple on Push Notifications?

MobileNotifier and Peter Hajas got a lot of attention on our site yesterday.
I reviewed MobileNotifier, a popular jailbreak replacement for notifications in iOS, and then we speculated that MobileNotifier’s developer, Peter Hajas, could have recently been hired by Apple and taken out of the jailbreak community to work on push notifications in an upcoming version of iOS.

This theory was propelled by a tip we received from who we assume to be an Apple employee at Cupertino. Our tipster told us that working on notification replacements for iOS, like MobileNotifier, was “bad timing for jailbreak developers” and that Apple was about to “take the jailbreak community by surprise.”

Directly following that tip, Peter Hajas announced on his blog that he was “taking a break” from developing for MobileNotifier to pursue “other opportunities.” Sound suspicious to you too?

While we may be grasping for straws here, another discovery from an iPhoneinCanadareader got our attention.

At the end of Peter’s blog post about discontinuing development of MobileNotifier, he ends with the line, “Stay hungry and stay foolish.”

In the 2005 Standford graduation speech, Mr. Steve Jobs himself was the keynote speaker. Steve Jobs ended his speech with a quote from the last edition of Whole Earth Catalogue. Guess what the tagline was?

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

Steve Jobs explained that the message behind that tagline has been what he has “always wished for myself.” Check out this video of the speech. The phrase is mentioned by Jobs at about the 13:50 mark.



Peter Hajas could very well be only giving a nod to Mr. Jobs by using that line at the end of his post, but there’s always the possibility that it could be something more. After all, Hajas couldn’t state the reason for why he was discontinuing development of MobileNotifier.

“I can’t say why, but it’s worth it. Trust me. If you look around hard enough, you’ll probably figure it out.“
That sounds pretty telling if you ask us. Apple got him. And he left that last clue in his post for some lucky detective to find.

When we broke the story that Peter Hajas could have been hired by Apple, he tweeted:
We can always dream, and that seems to be what Hajas wants us to do, if this discovered easter egg was left intentionally.

With WWDC right around the corner, it’s pretty obvious that Hajas wouldn’t be part of the team for a redesigned notifications system in iOS 5. But could Apple have hired (maybe contracted?) him to work on something else? Or even a future iOS release?

It could also be possible that the rumor of redesigned push notifications in iOS 5 is true, and that the new system from Apple has removed the need for a tweak like MobileNotifier. Only time will tell.

What do you think? Why would Peter Hajas have ended development for MobileNotifier so abruptly? In a very recent interview, he seemed super excited to continue coding and updating MobileNotifier. Why such a quick change of heart?

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