Developing QuickTime Applications for the iPod

It's commonly believed that Apple's iPod portable music player uses a bare-bones operating system developed by a company called Pixo, Inc., and that the device itself is a closed system insofar as only Apple can add software modules -- such as the games or contacts list manager -- to the device. And, it's further believed, even if there were a way to load third-party applications onto the device, actually writing such applications requires access to development tools whose availability is tightly controlled and that are expensive to license. In effect, the iPod is even less open than the original Macintosh computer (which is to say, not very open at all).

In fact, none of these beliefs is true. Once we know what's going on, it's fairly simple to develop quite powerful applications for the iPod using nothing more than a text editor and a programming language that most of us had considered to be long since obsolete. In this article, I'll show just how easy it is to write iPod applications by developing an application that can open and display QuickTime movies on the iPod. In addition, I'll show how to support the standard editing operations (cut, copy, paste, and undo). The result will be an iPod-based version of our QuickTime sample application, QTShell. For reasons that will become clear soon, let's call this application "SnoEez". Figure 1 shows a frame of a movie being displayed by SnoEez. (You may recognize this as a cropped version of our standard penguin movie, with the X-ray video effect applied to the entire movie.) more ..