
Early this month, we took a stroll down memory lane with the life and
times of Dark AleX. Ahh yes, the good ol' days. This time, we're paying
tribute to another homebrew hero. To say that his name commands respect from the
homebrew community is definitely an understatement, keeping in mind all his contributions to the scene. Now
let's take a moment to get to know another god atop the homebrew
Olympus, the father of iR Shell, the AhMazing AhMan.
The man behind the mask
Despite
his undeniable popularity, very little is known about the man behind
the monicker. The name, however, belongs to a distinguished few that
could aptly be referred to as the homebrew hall of fame. AhMan is right
up there with DaX, Fanjita, and all the other great devs who pioneered the homebrew scene and revolutionalized the PlayStation Portable.
AhMan has many useful apps under his belt, including the iR Commander, a number of USBhosts, and even a CFW update for Linksys Routers enabling PSP’s to play ad-hoc games via Xlink Kai.
He's been developing software for a long time, and he's got loads of
them, but every artist has a masterpiece. For AhMan, it's iR Shell.
iR Shell: from botched brew to Homebrew Hall of Fame
It was February of 2006 when AhMan released v1.0 of his iR Shell,
and thus began a revolution unlike any Shell program before it. It was,
at the time, one of the most stable shell apps out there, if not the
best. It was the first multitask shell program, plus it can function
as a universal iR remote plus has support for screenshot capturing. Despite
having numerous other contributions to the homebrew community, the name AhMan became nearly synonymous with iR Shell.
It all began when AhMan was researching a way to
turn brew PSP into a wireless controller to his Pentax cam. He failed.
But from this failure, he is able to develop iR Shell, and he's
been improving it ever since.
In and out of retirement
Just
seven months after the release of v1.0, iR Shell's popularity
skyrocketed from its initial release, and people couldn't keep their
mouse cursors from hitting the download button on every new update. At
this point, iR Shell had become arguably one of the best applications ever made for the PSP.
Reaching
a point when the app was, in Ahman's words, already a "pretty stable
& mature software under FW 1.5," AhMan decided to wrap it up and
label the app "complete," although he did indicate that he may return, depending on the progress of the FW 2.x hacking back then. With a few closing words, the homebrew community said goodbye to iR Shell at v2.2.
It didn't take long for AhMan to update. In December of the same year, three months after retiring iR Shell, AhMan stormed the scene again with v3.0, loaded with a heavy changelog plus new features to his already great program.
For
about a year, AhMan stayed in the scene, releasing updates, skins,
plugins, and keeping up with the latest CFW. But in January of 2008,
the father of iR Shell announced another retirement from the homebrew
scene, giving us the final public release of iR Shell at v3.9.
So there goes the great developer...or so we thought. Apparently, he can't keep himself from updating his baby, and so came iR Shell v4.7, which was made compatible with the 5.00M33.3 CFWs, as well as the Popsloader 5.00.
So as of now, AhMan isn't on the "retired" status. The latest version of iR Shell, v4.92, was released only two weeks ago, and another, much bigger update is expected to follow, featuring an advanced multitasking feature.
As
skilled a developer AhMan may be, he's certainly not Mr. Popular in
some corners of the scene. While they recognize iR Shell for what it
is, they're not too fond of ol' AhMan, saying he's a drama queen for
his recurring retirements.
There are many other things that
AhMan is being accused of, but one of the biggest complaints was that
because AhMan doesn't release the source code for iR Shell, even when
he said that he was gonna stop updating it. Apparently, some people
find that very annoying. Here's a year-old rant posted on TehSkeen.
Looking
ahead, it looks like the upcoming release will be quite the
headline-maker. As for us here at QJ, we'll be waiting until AhMan
drops the bomb. And as far as his career goes, this homebrew god
deserves major props for everything he has given to the homebrew
community. Everyone who's ever installed his apps would know - AhMan is
the real deal.