iPod Touch, iTunes, and unwanted processes

I recently got a second-generation iPod Touch. I don't make enough phone calls to make a phone contract worthwhile, much less an iPhone contract with O2 in the UK; and O2's PAYG (pay as you go) appears to charge GBP 7.50 per roaming MB, while I pay EUR 1 for first 50 MB with my Vodafone Ireland PAYG, whether I'm in the UK, anywhere else in Europe, or in the US. So, iPod Touch it is.

It's a nice device, both style-wise and as a hand-held web-browsing experience. The browser is good enough to create a paradox; limitations that only surface because of the increased expectations start to get a little annoying. For example, up to eight separate pages can be browsed simultaneously, but as soon as one of the pages gets big enough, information about the other open pages is forgotten beyond the URL / request parameters. This means that e.g. you don't want to leave a purchase page open while browsing in a parallel window, or you'll break navigation flow / possibly pay twice.

The browser also crashes a lot. I've had the device for about two days, and suffered many (8+) unprompted "back to main menu" transitions, with nary a hint from the device that the browser had crashed. It does make me wonder; how much of the reputation Apple has for good firmware is due to pretending that errors don't happen? The subsequent OS-level cleanup / resource management doesn't seem too solid either, since searches on the topic suggest that a clean reboot is what's necessary to restore this BSD-based Unix kernel to good running. This doesn't inspire confidence.

As a device for playing music, it's too large and heavy for my taste; I'm still using my second-generation Nano, even though I also have a third-generation Nano - the wheel is too small on it.

The draconian limitations that are de rigeur with Apple firmware chafe quite a lot. Even my humble K800 phone can create folders in the file system, browse it, start applications from arbitrary locations, open videos, music and pictures from arbitrary locations, etc., all using the same tree that you see when browsing the CF card from a PC. The iPod Touch doesn't have any of this: it's Apple's way or screw you, to be blunt. iTunes synchronization is a useless to me; I'm a file system guy - give me scripting, cron and hard & symbolic links and I'll create the structure I prefer myself. I suspect I won't be happy until the device is jailbroken.

Anyhow, the other reason I wanted to write this post, other than to praise and complain about the device, is the little setup I created to cope with iTunes 7, which I was reluctantly forced to upgrade to. The iPod Touch doesn't work without iTunes 7, and it also doesn't work without a bunch of other background services running, most importantly, the 'Apple Mobile Device' service.

Rather than have half a dozen Apple-related processes running, even though I'm not running iTunes and don't have a device connected to my machine, I wrote a little script to start up the necessary services upon iTunes startup, and kill off the unwanted processes after iTunes shutdown. They rely on Cygwin and some little utilities I wrote myself.

First up is 'hide.exe'. This simple executable, written in Delphi, runs a given process with a list of command-line arguments, but in a hidden window, by passing SW_HIDE as the nShow parameter. This basically lets a console hang around running my script while iTunes is running, waiting for it to exit, so that the script can clean things up later. The hide.exe executable itself is a GUI subsystem app, though it doesn't have a message pump or anything.

The second is a very simple killall script for Cygwin:

#!/bin/bash

if test -z "$1"; then
    echo "usage: $(basename $0) ..."
    echo "Kills all specified processes."
    exit
fi

while [ -n "$1" ]; do
    ps -W | grep -i "$1" | cut -b -10 | print0 | xargs -0 kill -f
    shift
done

Obviously, when using this script you don't want to be too ambiguous about your process search string. The 'print0' in the pipe is another little utility I wrote to bridge the gap between line-oriented programs, word-oriented programs and programs that can accept null-terminated strings. It simply reads each line one at a time, and prints out the same line with a null terminator instead of a newline. Without it, any programs with spaces in their names would be parsed by xargs as multiple separate arguments, since xargs, by default, breaks arguments on any whitespace, not just newlines.

With that aside, my iTunes wrapper script (I call it start-itunes) is fairly simple:

#!/bin/bash

itunes="${itunes:-/c/other/itunes/itunes.exe}"

net start 'Apple Mobile Device' > /dev/null
"$itunes" || messagebox "Failed to start \"$itunes\""
net stop 'Apple Mobile Device' > /dev/null || messagebox 'Failed to stop "Apple Mobile Device"'
net stop 'iPod Service' > /dev/null
killall SyncServer.exe distnoted.exe

It simply starts the required service, lets iTunes run to completion, and then stops the redundant services and blows away the crap left behind by iTunes. I don't use iTunes to "sync" anything, so I'm assuming that blowing them away doesn't hurt. I haven't had any problems, anyhow.

This script uses 'messagebox', yet another little utility I wrote, to display errors using the Win32 MessageBox function. This is necessary, otherwise the errors wouldn't be visible - the script is run from a hidden window.

The final step is the shortcut itself. Cygwin has a utility, mkshortcut, to create shortcuts, though I don't like its command-line syntax and wrote a wrapper script to make it look more like ln and friends. However, a Cygwin mkshortcut command-line for creating an appropriate shortcut for my script above might look a bit like this (watch the backslash, added for nicer PRE formatting):

mkshortcut -a "$(cygpath -w $(which bash.exe)) $(which start-itunes)" \
    -n start-itunes.lnk -i /c/other/itunes/iTunes.exe $(which hide.exe)

Since start-itunes and hide.exe are useful in themselves, they're on my path, so 'which' is able to find them.