Modding Sonos Desktop Controller to Landscape view

Question

Hi Forum !

I think ive found the right place and people to ask this question.

Im using Sonos Desktop Controller App, which is free from Appstore. For a long time ive waited for them to come up with a Landscape mode for the software, but it ONLY supports Portrait from factory defaults.

Now ive started to take the matter into my own hands, but im quite green in programming. ive searched around and found out a little, but not enough.

Ive got the software out of my Iphone, so that i can mod it in notepad ect. but i cant seem to find a windows based software that can decode the coding. furthermore, which files has to be modded to make this happen. i don't matter if the accelerator dont work - i only want the App to be viewed in Landscape -> unless it isn't a biggie applying the accellerator code.

Ive uploaded the package to a server, so you can down it for a overview.

Sonos Controller Dir

Best Regards from Denmark.

Answer 1

So let me get this straight. You want to change something in an application that you've downloaded from the app store so you're trying to change the app to support landscape mode by using Notepad on Windows? ROFL!!! Awesome! Stop it!! You're killing me!!! ROFL! ROFL! ROFL!!!

Sorry to laugh here, but man that is funny. You get an 'A' for effort though. Ok, maybe a 'B-'. ROFL!!

Seriously! You need four things:

• A Mac
• Xcode
• Erica Sadun's Book
• Some serious development skills because building a Sonos competitor will not be trivial--not to mention there's probably no way to create your own app to interface with their hardware, but that's a story all its own.

Best regards from Colorado and thanks for the humor.

Answer 2

To expand upon Matt's answer: it is completely impractical for you to edit the binary Sonos Desktop Controller application to introduce a landscape mode in the application. First, you'd need to decrypt the .ipa for the application which you've downloaded from the App Store (a nontrivial process that is also questionable enough for me not to link to a tutorial about it). Second, you'd need to use a hex editor to pick around inside the guts of the application. Windows Notepad will not give you the ability to edit a binary file like this.

Even then, it's not just a matter of flipping a bit somewhere in the binary to "enable" a landscape mode. Such a mode needs to be designed for by the developers themselves, which either involves custom code for such a mode or a landscape-specific interface that would be designed in Interface Builder, or both. Injecting this code would be nearly impossible within a binary that most of us have no clue about how its internal structure is laid out.

Finally, you'd need to be a member of the iPhone Developer Program (for $99 / year) in order to be able to codesign and install the newly modified application to your iPhone. Doing this at the command line for a binary is not a trivial process by itself.

Given all that, it would be easier for you to completely re-implement the application than it would be to hack a landscape mode into the binary. This is a reasonably complex application, so it will take you a while to produce a copy of it. All of this is why Matt (and I) find your question a little amusing.