3D
3D Photo Gallery (Part 1)
3D Photo Gallery (Part 2)

Audio
Poor Man's MIDI
Make A Metronome
iPod Tricks (Part 1)
iPod Tricks (Part 2)
iPod Tricks (Part 3)
Laugh Track Machine
Audio Player with Reverb
Shepard Melody
RB Phone Home
Build a Drum Machine

Custom Controls and Windows
Double Click Listbox
Draggable Metal Window
Double Click Canvas
Custom Buttons
Custom Buttons Part II
iTunes-style Listboxes
Custom Controls


General RB
Scrolling Windows
Using Mesage Dialogs
Case-Sensitive Word Finder
Introduction to Stacks
Wiggle Window
JPEG in PDF
Listbox Checkboxes
Background Applications
Listbox Auto-Find
Virtual Volumes
Time Tracker
Software Distribution (Part 1)
Software Distribution (Part 2)
Software Distribution (Part 3)
Software Distribution (Part 4)
Exceptions
Tips and Tricks
Text Clippings Made Easy

Graphics
Drawing a Simple Gradient
The SpriteSurface: Space Game
Image Spinner
Cropping Graphics (Part 1)
Cropping Graphics (Part 2)
Cropping Graphics (Part 3)
Cropping Graphics (Part 4)
Shimmer Graphics
Lissajous Figures
Simple Screen Capture
Vector Graphics
Kaleidoscope Images
Stegonography
Spirals!
Image Table
RB Magnifying Lens
Screen Capture
Color Picker Tutorial

Hacks
Ghost Grab
Speedy Mouse Extension
iTunes Plugins
iTunes Skinner

Mac OS X
Global Hot Key Event (Carbon Events)
Login Welcomer (Carbon Events)
Add/Remove Buttons
Resizable Sheets
Mac OS X Preferences Window
Using Sheets in REALbasic
Build a Bundle (Part 1)
Build a Bundle (Part 2)
Dock Your Passwords
Mac OS X Debugging
REALbasic Mac OS X Icon Tutorial
Animate Your Dock
RB and the Command Line

Menus
Window Menu
Templates Menu
Listbox Menu

Novelty
Guessing Game
Calendar Trivia
Tile Mixer
Zip Code Finder
Happy Valentine's Day
Merlin Simulator (Part 1)
Merlin Simulator (Part 2)
Merlin Simulator (Part 3)
Buzzword Machine
AppleSoft BASIC

Printing
Print to PDF

Registration
Registration Code Validation
Network Registration Codes

Resources
Picture Extractor (Part 1)
Picture Extractor (Part 2)

Serial
Caller ID (Part 1)
Caller ID (Part 2)
Caller ID (Part 3)

Speech
Speech Recognition

Socket Communication
Easy Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
MacPAD Version Checking
Display Web Image In Canvas
HTML IMG Tags
Version Tracking
Even Smarter Instant Messaging
Web Tiler
JavaScript and REALbasic
Stock Ticker (Part I)
Stock Ticker (Part 2)
AIM Mate

XML Manipulation
Simple XML Introduction

Video
Big Brother Video Capture

Note: All articles without a byline were written by Erick Tejkowski. When cleaning the site I removed them because the code differed from page to page, and I have yet to put them back in.

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iPod Trickery with REALbasic Part 1 06-06-03

Have you ever wondered how all those neat iPod utilities work? This week we start a multi-week tutorial about using REALbasic to have some fun with your iPod. Everyone knows that an iPod is really just a specialized external hard drive. When you mount your iPod on the desktop, you can double-click its icon to view its contents, copy files to the iPod, and select "Get Info" to learn about the drive.

Working with the iPod in REALbasic is really just as easy as working with files on any other drive. There are, however, a few simple secrets you need to know about first. Let's see what those secrets are!

iPod Secrets
Yes, an iPod is really just a hard drive. Apple has made judicious use of invisible files on the iPod, though. Using REALbasic, you can easily scan through the items on the drive, looking for invisible files and folders. If you do, you'll soon discover that there is one invisible folder named iPod_Control. Inside that folder is another folder named Music. Look inside the Music folder and you'll find any number of folders with names like F00, F01, and F02... Within each of those numbered folders, you can find the audio files that make up the Library on your iPod. For this week's project, we'll find those music files.

Build the Interface
Launch REALbasic and add a Listbox, a PopupMenu, and two Pushbuttons to Window1. Arrange the interface however you want, but mine looks like this:

Next, add a Property to Window1 to keep track of the found iPods.

iPods(0) as folderItem

Add the Code
The first think we'll do is scan through all mounted drives, looking for an iPod. All we have to do is look for that iPod_Control folder. If we find one, we can guess that it's an iPod. Then, we stick the names of all found iPods in the PopupMenu control. Add the following code to the Action event of PushButton1.

dim f as folderItem dim i,n as integer redim iPods(0) popupmenu1.deleteAllRows n=VolumeCount for i= 0 to n-1 //look for invisible "iPod_Control" file //at the root level of the iPod f=Volume(i).child("iPod_Control") if f<>nil and f.exists then //we found one! listBox1.addrow "Found an iPod named:"+Volume(i).name //remember it for later iPods.append Volume(i) //add the name to PopupMenu1 popupmenu1.addrow Volume(i).name //enable the "find songs" button PushButton2.enabled=TRUE end if next //select the first item in popupMenu1 if popupmenu1.listCount>0 then popupmenu1.listindex = 0 end if

Once we find an iPod, its a simple matter to loop through all of the music folders to search for files. Add the following code to the Action event of PushButton2 to scan the iPod for tunes.

dim i,j as integer dim f as folderItem dim musicFolders(0) as folderItem me.enabled=FALSE f = iPods(PopupMenu1.listindex + 1).child("iPod_Control").child("Music") if f<>nil then //find all folders in the hidden Music folder for i = 1 to f.count if f.item(i).directory then musicFolders.append f.item(i) end if next //now loop through each folder and grab the songs for i = 1 to ubound(musicFolders) for j = 1 to musicFolders(i).count listBox1.addrow musicFolders(i).item(j).name next next end if

Conclusion
That's all there is to it! Choose Debug-Run to see your work. Don't forget to mount an iPod before you test it, otherwise this project won't do much. You can download the code for this week's project here.

If you have a lot of files on your iPod, you might notice that this code takes some time to find the files. Worse yet, it seems to lock up the interface while it searches. Next week we'll see how to give the user some feedback while the project searches for files. We'll also make the application more responsive by "threading" the heavy lifting. Finally, we'll improve the utility by allowing the user the copy files from the iPod to another hard drive. See you next week!

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