iFunBox Development

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 version are:

Chinese (SC):		by Baby Jing	2009.3.2
Chinese (TC):		by Baby Jing	2009.3.3
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

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.

iFunBox v0.6.199.35 is released. [ download ]
What’s New:
1. Full Managing Songs and Movies to iPhone and iPod: Uploading, downloading and deleting media clips.
2. Shortcut for Ringtones.
3. Enhanced data transmission engine.
4. Fix compatible problem with iTunes 8.0, no more crash.

Limitations:
1. Media files uploaded by iFunBox will not be recognized by iTunes. iTunes report it cannot read the content and asks to restore.
2. Manually Respring or Reboot is required after uploading media files.
3. Currently iPod Shuffle can not play songs uploaded by iFunBox.
4. For 2.x firmware, media uploading doesn’t work properly. We’re just work on that.

Many users reported iFunBox crashes after iTunes was updated to v8.0. We found the USB communication runtime library (iTunesMobileDevice.dll) was changed which cause iFunBox failure. The problem has been fixed in the newly released iFunBox v0.6.199.35.

More precisely, the memory layout of the structure am_device was extended 105bytes. The structure is used in many fundamental call for communicating with iPhone via USB port. Though the meaning of these addtional bytes is not clear to us, fortunately we don’t need to know that. The structure is created by the runtime library and feeded to other calls.

The updated am_device structure is defined as:
struct am_device {
unsigned char unknown0[16]; /* 0 - zero */
unsigned int device_id; /* 16 */
unsigned int product_id; /* 20 - set to AMD_IPHONE_PRODUCT_ID */
char *serial; /* 24 - set to AMD_IPHONE_SERIAL */
unsigned int unknown1; /* 28 */
unsigned char unknown2[4]; /* 32 */
unsigned int lockdown_conn; /* 36 */
unsigned char unknown3[8]; /* 40 */
unsigned char unknown4[6*16+1]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
unsigned char padding[8]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
};


We just got a brand new iPhone 3G and tested. iFunBox works well with the iPhone 3G as a jailed device without any modification of our program. Cheers!! 

The features of file explorer (use iPhone as a portable disk) and backup iTunes managed songs/movies work well with the non-hacked iPhone 3G.

Currently we’re working on uploading songs and movies to iPhone and iPod. We will release the new version soon.

1. International.
2. Thumbnails for image files and windows executable files.
3. Contact and short message managment.
4. … have no idea ….

iFunBox V0.5.181.30 is released.

Core Feature:
1. Full access to Apple Mobile Device filesystem: copy, move, delete, creation, rename.
2. Map native filesystem (USB mass-storage) for handling iPod series.
3. Optimized multi-thread data transfer engine with task scheduling and prioritizing.
4. Device detection and recognition.
3. Windows Explorer style user interface (Folders Tree, File List, Drag&Drop).

Application Feature:
1. Parse iTunes DB for iPod media file management.
2. General purpose storage.
2. Unicode plain text conversion for EBooks supports.
3. Batch image resizing and cropping for iPhone wallpaper generation.
4. iPhone specification PNG Conversion (CgBI header removal).