iFunBox Development

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.

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.

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.

We received many complains that iTunes report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading video or song using iFunbox. The cause of this problem is that Apple has special hashing checking in iTunes which is not well handled by iFunbox. We apologize for that and will fix the problem in the next release.

Situation
0. For all iPhones and iPod Touch, iTunes will report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading some media file using iFunbox due to the hashing checking in iTunes.
1. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 1.1.x, the uploaded songs/movies will be recognized by iPod on the device and can be played. In FW 1.1.x, the device doesn’t check the hashing.
2. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 2.x.x, the uploaded songs/movies will NOT be recognized due to the hashing checking on the device.
3. For other models of iPods (Classic, Video, Shuffle and etc), iTunes will not ask for restoring and just simply remove the media files uploaded by iFunbox. For devices produced before 2007 (not exactly), the uploaded media files will be recognized and can be played. However for newest devices, the uploaded media files can NOT be played. I guess, it is also due to hashing checking.

Do NOT follow iTunes
Though iTunes report ”Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring, I believe no one would like to do that. iTunes force you update the firmware along with restoring and after restoring all user data will be delete including installed 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history. Also you will need to jailbreak after restoring.

Rescue the relationship with iTunes.
Here we provide steps to cheat iTunes that the device has been restored by deleting “iTunes_Control” folder. so that iTunes will initialize the media database (iTunesDB). The way we provided here keeps all user data unchanged except songs and movies. 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history will be preserved after process. Also you don’t need to jailbreak again.
We test the steps on iPhone 2G, FW1.1.4 and iTunes 8.0. Thanks Gaz, he tested the steps on iPhone 3G and iTunes 7.1.

0. Close iPod application on iPhone, stop music playing.
Close iTunes, You must close iTunes!!! Then open iFunBox.

1. Backup media files. (Optional)
if you don’t care, just skip.

2. Backup contact list and SMS. (Optional)
Though the following steps will not erase those information, I’d like to have those things backuped just in case.
Contact List: //var/mobile/Library/AddressBook
SMS: //var/mobile/Library/SMS

3. Browse the [Raw File System], Delete the folder iTunes_Control Located in “//var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control”

4. Close iFunbox and then open iTunes for setup.
Wait seconds for iTunes searching for the connected iPhone.
Now iTunes will ask you to setup instead of restoring it, after the iTunes_Control folder was deleted.
Choose [Set up as an New Phone] and uncheck all sync options, iTunes will initialize an empty media database. Thus, the iTunes_Control folder and subfolders will be created. Other user data such as 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list and SMS histroy keep unchanged.
Choose [Restore from backup of], the contact list and SMS history will be overwritten to the state as backup.
In this step, my choice is [Set up as an New Phone], then click [Continue]. Uncheck the automatically sync then click [Done].

Then iTunes takes a long time for sync and finally we have iTunes back.

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
};


Crash dump file (*.dmp) will appear when the program crashes. Sending us the crash dump can help us improve the i-FunBox.

– iFunBox Dev Team ( ifunbox.dev@gmail.com )