It would be interesting if Cisco will take advantage of this in any way to allow the control of their networking devices. Not that it's too hard to plug in with an old laptop, but still, the iPad is convenient.
It's a little confusing to me why Apple makes it so hard for people to use their devices in customer specific ways like this cable. I read a while back that TV networks like CNN and ESPN were using iPads to control on-air graphics in near real time. They're huge companies they can afford the custom engineering to jailbreak the devices and to write custom apps. But why doesn't Apple make it easier for everyone else?
Apple does make it easier for everyone else willing to pay $99. You don't have to jailbreak. You just pay your $99 fee and you've got full access to run whatever software you want.
There's even an open source community of people making iOS software. They're chinned by the "open source" community because they're hacking for iOS, but they exist.
CNN or ESPN don't have to jailbreak. A big part of the problem is that you assumed they did, because the "open source" community is running around pretending like everything is locked down and you have to jailbreak to run arbitrary software. You don't, you just become a developer.
The bonus of becoming a developer is that you also get to hack on pre-release versions of the OS and stuff like that.
It's a little confusing to me why Apple makes it so hard for people to use their devices in customer specific ways like this cable. I read a while back that TV networks like CNN and ESPN were using iPads to control on-air graphics in near real time. They're huge companies they can afford the custom engineering to jailbreak the devices and to write custom apps. But why doesn't Apple make it easier for everyone else?