Access iPhone from Windows

Question

I've seen a couple programs running in Windows that could access the iPhone and iTouch with access to the photo library and music. What APIs are used for this kind of development?

Answer 1

Checkout Bonjour. It's a service discovery protocol by Apple and there is a windows implementation available. Apple has released various samples that you can use as a starting point. Checkout this sample game WiTap to get started. And for a broader overview, this tutorial might be good. Once you discover a network device or machine, you can use whatever data format is convenient such as XML, JSON, home-grown, or binary.

Answer 2

Apple provides an iTunes COM SDK that will allow you to pull data directly from iTunes. Although I haven't used it, this may be what you are looking for. I imagine you would need to have the iPhone sync'd with iTunes before you could access information from it - but again I'm not sure.

Here is an older link that will redirect you properly through Apple's site: http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html