I speak at a number of conferences and am giving a couple of talks later this year about Dojo on the iPhone. Of course, giving a talk without being able to show demos is frustrating, but giving a talk without having high-quality screenshots is silly. There wasn’t a solution known outside of Apple until recently, and it is still a bit of a process, or I daresay a bit of a quest. These instructions are for Mac users… I’m sure the steps are pretty similar for Windows users as well.

  1. Follow the instructions at LifeHacker for a simpler installer to add applications to your iPhone
  2. Install the Community Sources, BSD Subsystem, MobileTerminal, OpenSSH, and UIctl apps, in that order (UIctl is optional, but a really easy way to start/stop SSH)
  3. Download a copy of Erica Sadun’s screenshot utility to your machine
  4. Download a copy of iphuc (I chose the universal binary)
  5. Connect your iPhone to your Mac if not already connected.
  6. Follow the instructions for using iphuc
  7. Within iphuc, on the iPhone’s filesystem: cd /bin
  8. putfile screenshot
  9. chmod +x /bin/screenshot
  10. Now, on the iPhone, enable ssh ( I found UIctl to require the least amount of typing)
  11. From the Terminal on your Mac, ssh@[ip_address] (either open terminal and type ifconfig, or drill down into the wireless network until you see the IP address; note you cannot do this over the EDGE network as far as I know)
  12. The default ssh password is dottie… I suggest you change it with a passwd command
  13. After you have the desired screen showing on the iPhone, type /bin/screenshot on your Mac’s terminal. Note, you can do this within MobileTerminal on the iPhone, but you can only get screenshots of the Terminal app in my limited experience
  14. Back within iphuc, cd /tmp</a>
  15. getfile [filename]
  16. And yes, that is what I consider easy enough to be worth the effort, but I look forward to the day when this is easier. And so the quest concludes! And the result:

    17. Cometd Chat

    MobileTerminal

    Update: If you don’t want to work on your iPhone SSH chops, you can follow the first two steps, and install Dock. Just be sure to not install SummerBoard or one of the other launcher apps.