Sneaking Audio Onto The iPhone

Well – it looks like I wrote my first iPhone utility. A pretty remarkable feat when you consider that I don’t have an iPhone. Even more remarkable when you consider the utility was written in late 2005, and hasn’t been touched since :)

Today Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, discovered a clever trick for putting getting audio onto your iPhone from whatever Mac you happen to be on. The clever trick is implemented with the help of my experimental utility, Typecast.

I had originally written the utility to help turn normal files into podcasts, because I prefer the way iTunes handles podcast files for spoken word audio. Jason figured out that if you sync the iPhone’d podcasts separately from music, you can effectively overwrite your “podcasts” with whatever audio files no matter where you are. Just set up a fake podcast with Typecast, and sync!

I think it’s a pretty cool example of simple software enabling a complex solution. The fact that the software is still useful now, and useful in conjunction with a piece of hardware I don’t even own, makes me pretty happy.