iFunBox Development

Many thanks for your supports and loves, we accept donations now.
The donation button in iFunBox V0.95 is now enabled when you connected to the internet. It is not a silence update. Instead, it is because iFunBox detected the donation link is available.

My Paypal account is blocked by Singapore Law. But I have nothing to do with the country.
I am checking the problem. Donation is temporarily stopped.
Paypal permanently blocked my account, sigh. In the two days, I totally obtained six donations. Thanks for your supports. But the donation model is not working.

iFunBox New Version (V0.95.279.247) is now available.
[ download ]

What’s New:
1. Download music and movies from iPhone/iPod of any model with any firmware.
2. Fix a bunch of problems:
> Failed to locate Mobile Device Support (iTunesMobileDevice.dll)
> File view don’t refresh after copying / deleting
> PNG is not converted when open from shortcut folders
> Display just empty icon of image thumbails on Windows Vista and Windows 7
> PNG is not converted to PC format on Windows Vista and Windows 7
> Miscellaneous UI problems on Windows Vista and Windows 7

Highlight:

Now listing of music and movie on iPod is based on a different way, which depends nothing on the iTunesDB. So, it is now supporting all models/firmwares of iPhones and iPod Touch. It even works well with iPod, Shuffle and Nanos. But it is not fully tested. Since is not depending on iTunesDB, iFunbox may recover music and movie files even when iTunesDB is corrupted or iTunes is refused to connect.

Feature of uploading media files to iTunesDB is totally removed. Anyone who need it may use the previous version. Good things are iFunbox will never ruin iTunesDB in the future. We haven’t tested with iPad since we don’t have one. So, if you tried iFunbox on iPad, please let us know.

iFunbox relies on the AFC2 service to access the root file system of iPhones. AFC2 is usually enabled when jailbreak as many previous Jailbreak tools do. If AFC2 serivce is not enabled, iFunbox will recognize it as a jailed iphone and access the file system with AFC service.

Rcently iFunbox is found recognizing iPhones jailbroken by blackra1n as jailed ones. The reason is that the AFC2 service is not enabled in blackra1n’s jailbreaking procedure.

A quick fixup is to install a tiny app from Cydia, afc2add to enable the AFC2 service on iPhone.
More details can be found at:
http://www.ihackintosh.com/2009/10/afc2add-solve-ifunbox-iphonebrowser-diskaid-with-blackra1n-phones/

Thanks “Helper” for the message.

After several rounds of fighting against Apple’s iTunes database, we decide to stop following any further variations of the new database format. Instead, we are looking for alternatives of the iPod application on iPhone/iTouch.

Our plan is to provide an open, efficient and easy-to-use solution for obtaining and enjoying video and music on iPhone. The key of the solution is to establish an open, flexible and efficient standard of playlist exchange format, which describes a list of the video and music on iPhone and their associated information such as album title, cover and the year of publish. Such a standard bridges the mediaplayer on iPhone and File browsers on PC/Mac and provides the seamless user experience of copy-and-play of media files in any format. On the other hand, we are open to alternative ideas.

We are calling for collaborations with iPhone developers who are working on mediaplayer/file browser. We are working on a dedicate edition of the ifunbox to convert and transfer media files from PC/Mac to iPhone via high-speed USB connection.

iFunbox V0.9.257.241 is just released. [ download ]

What’s New:
1. Fix compatibility problem with iTunes 9
2. support customized shortcuts: add, rename and delete

All localization  versions are updated, with original translation dictionaries.

Highlight:

Besides the built-in shortcuts, users can add customized shortcuts pointing any locations of the iPhone’s file system. Customized shortcut is added by clicking the “Add to Shortcut” item in the context menu of the folder to be pointed. The list of customized shortcuts is stored on your iPhone. So, these shortcuts will always appear on iFunbox V0.9 running on any PC.

We received a lot of feedback that i-funbox stops working after iTunes 9 installed. The problem is that the Apple Mobile Device Support is also updated with iTunes 9 upgrading. After a quick check, we found the device is detected but fails to connect to AFC service on iPhone, on which file system access is based. It seems some communication protocols are changed on the application level.

We are investigating ways for workaround.
We just find the problem is that the internal signature of the string representation has been changed in the new release of iTunes 9 as well as Apple Mobile Device Support. We have fixed the problem by assigning the signature with the new standard. We are now testing the fix-up with previous versions of iTunes and will release a new version within 8 hours.

I decide to add Favorites feature that the user can add its own shortcut. So, the new release postponed to after next 12 hours.

iFunbox V0.9.257.241 is released, all localized versions are updated.

The recent release of iTunes 8.2 ship with an updated iTunesMobileDevice.dll which is slightly not compatible with previous one. At least, we found an important function “AFCGetFileInfo” is removed from its exported functions. The function is used to look at the type (file or directory) of the entries of the filesystem as well as the size of the file, which is frequently used in file browsing applications like iFunbox. Now iFunbox got instantly crash after start up because on-demand loading of this function fails. For other applications that is hardly linked with iTunesMobileDevice.dll may refuse to start up.

We are seeking for work around.
The problem is just fixed, we released an updated version 0.8.250.160.

iFunbox V0.8.250.160 is out now [ download ]

What’s New:
1. Uploading Music and Video to iPhone and iPhone 3G (tested on lastest firmware 2.2.1)
2. Supporting multi-language user interface, and calling for translation
3. Fixed compatibility with Apple iTunes 8.2
4. Robust parsing of meida file’s metadata (e.g. album name and titles)

Highlight:
Uploading media file to iPhone with firmware 2.x is now enabled. So that you can uploading music and video to iPhone like i-FunBox V0.6 does. We really appreciate Alba for sharing the DBVersion trick to us for beating Apple again. More details can be found here.

Limitation:
1. DBVersion trick is only applicable to jailbroken iPhones. So jailbroken is required for uploading media files. DBVersion trick is a lucky work around and works fine with 2.x firmware, yet the trick could be very easily disabled by Apple of later updated firmware. Worry about the coming 3.x firmware.
2. Uploaded media file is not acknowledged by iTunes, still. iTunes may refuse to sync. To bring iTunes back, it might be fixed. Yet recectly failure cases are reported, please use the media uploading function at your own risk. In the worst case, the problem will be fixed by restoration of iphone to factory settings using iTunes.

The newly released i-FunBox V0.8 is for the user all over the world instead of only for English speakers. An UI translation plug-in (*.usm) is supported in i-FunBox and is ready for displaying user interface in all different language.

We invite you to participate in translating i-FunBox to your own language and benefit all users around the world. Besides English community, we find i-FunBox is widely spreaded in community of many place in Europe and Asia. Translations of languages in these areas are especially welcomed, such as Russian, French, Dutch and Japanese.

Translation to your native language many take about a few hours just as easy as editing a text file. We acknowledged every contributor in the About dialog like the red box in the below (a Traditional Chinese translation ).

Multi-language Versions have been Translated

Up to now, available versions are:

Chinese (SC):		by Baby Jing	2009.3.2
Chinese (TC):		by Baby Jing Revised by Jamie Hwang	2009.3.3 2010.1.13
Japanese:		by Woggie	2009.4.17
Russian:		by Yarkovoy	2009.4.23
Dutch:		by Sabaoon Pamir	2009.4.24
Spanish:		by Fernando Dichiera	2009.5.2
Korean:		by Jaedong Kim	2009.5.21
Turkish:		by iPhoneShake.com	2009.5.30
Italian:		by Pippo X0	2009.6.16
German:		by Boehst	2009.7.20
French:		by bsdune	2009.8.29
Romanian:		by Catallin (Pitesti)	2009.10.13
Portuguese:		by ® MS ® Softwares	2009.12.2

How to Translate

1. download the template_package. It is a Unicode text contains each sentence to be translated in each line. Also a special version of i-FunBox for testing is included.
2. use text editor (e.g. Notepad) to append every translated sentence after comma.
3. Translate the sentence “English Version” into something like ” xxx version by yyyy ” in native language. This entry will be displayed in About Dialog to show your credit.
4. save the template and send it to ifunbox.dev@gmail.com with your name and the name (both in English and in the translated language) of the translated language.

Things might be concerned and useful:
1. the English sentence, before comma, should not be modified. Just append the translated sentence after comma.
2. [!] or [ some url ] may appear at the begining of some sentences. They are some scripts to display an exclamation icon or some URL can be clicked. Please keep they at the begining of the translated sentence.
3. comma is used as a seperator, so please use \’ to represent comma in sentence.
4. %s, %d, %02d are special keywords like placeholders, which will be replace with strings or numbers determined in runtime.
5. \n\r is representing a line break.
6. An example of traditional Chinese translation is here.

Limitations:
Uploading music and movie to iPhone is now disabled on devices with firmware 2.x.

Highlight:
Thumbnail previewing helps a lot for wallpaper management.
It is also integrated in all other folders including camera folder. Now it is more easy to seletively delete photos in the camera and replace resource images in Applications.