Getting started with writing a desktop app that talks to an iPhone

Question

I'm thinking of writing an app to selectively transfer photos/music to and from my iPhone, mostly for fun and personal convenience. However, I'm stuck at the very beginning -- where do I look to find information on how to do this?

Pretty much every link I see talks about developing applications that run on the iPhone, but nothing about desktop app for interfacing with an iPhone.

I'm on Windows (no access to a Mac, but I'll take suggestions for that for when I eventually acquire one), and I'm most familiar with C#, but other languages are definitely an option.

Can anybody offer me a few pointers on getting started? Thanks.

Edit: to clarify further, I don't need information on how to write applications that run ON the iphone. There are plenty of resources out for that. :) What I'm looking for it some pointers on how to "talk" to an iPhone or an iPod through the USB cord, if that's even possible.

Edit #2: I found libmobiledevice library that effectively does what I'm talking about on Linux. I don't think I'm too keen on attempting to port it over to Windows, though. :)

Answer 1

I found what I was looking for: SharePodLib. Thanks, everyone.

Answer 2

I recommend and have used the following options:

Option 1:

Run a small and light webserver in the iPhone and of course, use HTTP to transfer. I recommend mongoose websever, i've tried it with very simple and very heavy load. Also here, you can find an actual drag and drop project to deploy this webserver in the iPhone.

Option 2:

Use something like Bonjour, this is something very useful if you want the "smart" discovery of your device in the network, maybe for opportunistic peer discovery. You can check here and here, to understand how to get bonjour to run in the iPhone and use it to exploit discovery and sharing.

Hope it helps!!