So, the iPod touch was announced yesterday, and made available to order. I’ve placed an order for the 8GB model (having bought a 30GB iPod classic not long ago, which is plenty big enough to contain everything I have), pretty much purely so I can do some iPhone programming.

According to MacRumors, the iPod touch and the iPhone both run the same operating system, on the same hardware, to the degree where the apps on the iPod touch are “the same damn binaries” as on the iPhone. This means that I’ll be able to do some work with ‘Touch OS X’, be it the UIKit or more esoteric items such as CoreSurface (low-level graphics), GMM (Google Maps), DeviceLink, ITSync (iTunes sync, which probably uses DeviceLink internally), MultitouchSupport, MusicLibrary (in Obj-C, no less), and the iPhone Preferences.

My order is due to ship by September 28th, and due to arrive by October 5th. Hopefully it’ll ship ahead of schedule, but once it arrives, we’ll see whether there’s a disk mode I can enable, and whether that gives us the ability to see the OS drive. Personally, I have my fingers crossed for a Journaled HFS+ partition with a custom UUID, like the Apple TV’s software restore partition. That’s at least mountable on the desktop.

I can hardly wait !

PS: I’m now following John Gruber’s example and making all my posts using MarsEdit by Daniel Jalkut. It seems to work really quite nicely, so go & buy it now. Yes now. No, you can’t wait until later. Oh, okay, if you’re actually in the middle of something then you can wait until you’re done. But as soon as you’re done you’re going to buy it. Bokay?