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Comment by MiguelHudnandez | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see more about how to reverse engineer this information.

I think it's most likely this wasn't reverse engineered, but was somehow leaked by an engineer at Apple. But, if you wanted to try, you can open the simulator binary in a text editor (/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/iPhone Simulator.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhone Simulator) where you'll find a bunch of strings towards the bottom, including:

* minVersion * capabilities * width * height * eagle * giraffe * forceEagle * forceGiraffe * canTether * homeOriginX * homeOriginY * homeOriginXHalfsize * homeOriginYHalfsize * productFamily * monkey * dogcow * squirrel

I'm not sure how one would have known to look there, but once you do it's kind of obvious that eagle/giraffe are related to customizing some sort of width/height. Based on the other strings, they definitely belong in the .plist, so it's pretty straightforward to figure things out.

I have no idea what squirrel, monkey, and dogcow are for.

It's pretty simple with a disassembler. For instance... http://cl.ly/image/330V1S0y3i1S

A disassembler won't tell you that "giraffe" means "simulated device height"

You have to be creative - giraffes are tall, eagles have wide wingspans. I can only assume future iPhones gather nuts for winter hibernation.

Obviously not. It's up to the tinkerer to figure that out (which is clearly possible by tracing around).

Again, this is pretty trivial with a disassembler such as Hopper that can generate pseudocode.

What disassembler is this?

Hopper - http://www.hopperapp.com/

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