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I have been loving my 8GB iPod Touch since I got it last Christmas, and after jailbreaking it the moment I got it I have played with all the fun (and useful) community-built applications for it. There are reasons why I don’t have an iPhone yet, however. I’d love to use one as it could make my personal and accelerating business life much more efficient. I have a few major caveats that I expected the Internet community to have solved a while ago: I have Verizon, and like it (for now), so I have to wait for the 3G version to come out this summer, but where is a hacked USB interface for the iPod Touch and iPhone? I hate iTunes, and since the entire filesystem and bootloader for both devices has now been hacked and made accessible, why hasn’t anyone rewritten the USB interface on these devices to let any program access and manipulate them?

Allow me to provide some history between me and Apple. I dislike Apple. I love their products. They look wonderful and have incredible features. Ignoring the heinous price tags I have one problem with Apple: their restrictive use of media. Windows is not OSX. iTunes looks horrendous in Windows and performs just as poorly. I’m sure everything is handy-dandy in Mac-land, but in Windows every mp3 player you plug into the computer pops up as a new drive in My Computer, and, while you can use proprietary software to access it, working with Windows Explorer means that any other application such as a user’s preferred media player can work with it too. Not so with iPods. While there are alternatives for using iPods with software other than iTunes (I have had a RedChairSoftware Anapod Ultimate License for years so I can work on people’s iPods; why the hell haven’t they updated the software in two years though!!!) not all features are accessible. It frustrates me so much when a manufacturer captures such a powerful chunk of the market with a wonderful device but chokes the capabilities of the device and users. When I knew I was getting an iPod Touch I had mixed feelings. I was very excited to get a device on the forefront of what I like to call the Interface Computing Movement. Such devices as the Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii, and Microsoft Surface are paving the way for more intuitive computing interfaces to expand the potential users of technology. There was a dark blotch on my excitement, however, as I knew I would be forced into using Apple’s iTunes since no third-party applications supported it yet. Let me paint the scene for you:

I walked up to my girlfriend and explained how I would be getting an iPod Touch for Christmas. She was surprised at first, knowing that I hated iPods and Apple products in general because of how closed their architecture was, but knew I had done my best to create alternatives. She, herself, had never used iTunes, and from day one of receiving her iPod had used Anapod.
It was when I broke the news, sadly, that I wouldn’t be able to use Anapod, and would have to use iTunes until an alternative was provided, that she burst out laughing in my face. My girlfriend never does that.

I accepted my fate and started my life down the road of iTunes. I rarely use it, only to transfer songs (none of which have come from the iStore), contacts, and calendar events from Outlook. I don’t even use Outlook. I’d rather integrate with Google’s Calendar and Contacts database, but sadly iTunes doesn’t provide anything to help me out. Since jailbreaking the iPod Touch I try to do everything over WiFi. It’s been several months now, and the Jailbreaking community has been hard at work long before I entered the scene, so where is the alternative?

At this point only few applications have rudimentary support for the iPod Touch. Most of these are extremely buggy or use a poor interface such as SSH over WiFi. We have had access to the iPod Touch’s file system for a while and now have access to the bootloader. Why hasn’t anyone rewritten the iPod Touch’s and iPhone’s USB interface? Let me elaborate. In every USB capable device there is an interface (I’m sure there are special names for these things) that tells the computer you plug it into what the device is, how to talk to it, and then passes data between the device and the computer. As any iPhone or iPod Touch owner has seen already, if you plug your device into a Windows computer without iTunes it will set it up as a camera. If you have iTunes, then a process must be running in the background at all times to interface with the device, and only iTunes can actually connect to it! I, for one, am now a minimalist. I only want software starting and running on my computer when I am actually using it unless it’s absolutely necessary such as anti-virus. I don’t want a different piece of software running for each peripheral I might connect to the computer. That just pisses me off. Couldn’t someone rewrite that USB interface on the iPod Touch and iPhone to allow a Windows machine to connect to it like any other mp3 player? I’m talking about plugging it into the computer, and a new drive popping up in My Computer that could run in one of two modes: Standard or Advanced.

Standard mode would display directories for only the media folders: Pictures, Music, Videos, Contacts, etc. Users could add or remove files from any of these directories at will, and the USB interface on the device would make sure they were taken care of. The Advanced mode would allow access to the entire file system. Obviously this could let the user break things, which is why it would only be recommended for advanced users.

If this happened it would be a dream come true. No longer would I need any trace of iTunes (or any other Apple software on my computer for that matter.) My hate for iTunes will have to wait for another article, but hopefully this one makes it rather apparent. It’s much more long-winded and disorganized than it has to be since it’s a spin-off from a rant I have been spraying for years. Regardless, I’m hoping an expert on this issue can let me know why this hasn’t happened. Is it much more difficult than I think? Has just nobody thought about this? Maybe if enough people pay attention then the one person who can develop such a hack will attempt it. I’d love some feedback on this issue.