iPhone. Transfering large dataset from desktop to device via syncing via iTunes.

Question

I'm working on a project that lends itself nicely to a syncing usage scenerio. The idea is that users will "sync". their iPhone with their desktop PC or Mac running iTunes and ingest perhaps 1 gig of data onto the device. Then, once they are untethered they interact with this humungous data set pull from the solid state disk on the device.

What APIs should I look at to build an app to support this usage?

Cheers, Doug

Answer 1

The bad news is that there is no way to hook into the iTunes sync process. There are no public APIs at least.

Of course there are other options. Off the top of my head:

• A server in your iPhone application that an app on your PC can connect to (or vice versa). Of course you'd have to write the app, possibly for both Windows and Mac
• Distribute the 1Gb of data with your app but in a highly compressed format. Extract on first run
• There are new APIs in 3.x that allow access to the dock connector. They're really for connecting to peripherals rather than a PC but you might be able to get it working. You'd need to check the small-print to make sure that Apple would allow it

Once you have the data, Core Data is an obvious candidate for processing it.