Table of Contents |
| The File Manager - Overview

Overview Searching and Filtering File Sets File Extensions

The File Manager is the foundation of iFuntastic.
It acts like the Finder on your computer (although it is not as sophisticated.) It has various limitations partly due to the time it takes to get information off the iPhone and the constraints that the low level tools impose.
Select 'File Manager' from the Window menu to get a file manager dialog or click on the File Manager button to go to the File Manager page in the main window. The file manager displays files and folders as lists of items. Usually each list displays the contents of a single folder on the phone or on disk. I'll use items instead of 'files and folders' in the following description.
The standard file manager displays two lists side-by-side for easy data transfer. The right list has a preview section below it. You can drag the divider between list and preview to adjust their relative sizes. Above each list are three drop-down menus.
Path Menu
The Path menu shows each folder from the current one up to the Desktop. Select from it to open the desired folder.
Go Menu
The Go menu lets you switch to the previous location and to the Desktop. The desktop is the top level and displays the device(s) and disk volumes. Double-click to open them. The Go menu also contains submenus for locations of interest on the device or on disk. The Bookmarks menu lets you save your own locations, and the History menu keeps track of the locations you visited. It helps to navigate to the same location in different file manager lists. 'Open in Finder' (if enabled,) opens the current (disk-)folder in the Finder.
Options Menu
The third menu is the Options menu which contains settings and functions related to the item list.
Refresh Listing rebuilds the list. iFuntastic cannot easily detect - much less keep track of - all changes that happen to each item on the phone. The phone is not just a storage device, it is a computer that does its own thing with its files and folders. Refresh the listing after you installed stuff with Cydia or Installer or simply to make sure that you have the most recent listing.
Update Thumbnails makes or updates thumbnails of all images in the current list.
Whenever there are more than 100 items in a list, iFuntastic splits them into groups for better performance. Each group is preceded by a group header. A click on it will expand or collapse it. The 'Expand All Headers' and 'Collapse All Headers' functions do as they say.
You can create text files and folders in the current folder with the 'New Text File' and 'New Folder' functions. You will be asked for a name.
If Preview Clicked Item is switched on, then iFuntastic will show an item's preview when you click the item (instead of the info icon.) Sounds and movies get played, and images and text files get displayed. Files on the phone need to get loaded and possibly converted, so this may be a bit slow, but otherwise it's a great way to browse through, oh, your iTunes library for example.
For the last three functions, please see Searching and Filtering.
Data Transfer, Viewing and Editing
Navigate to the desired source and destination folders, then drag individual items (or a selection) from one list to the other. You can drag into folders when they are hilited in green; for this the cursor must be over the icon or name of the folder. Note that iFuntastic makes copies only - to move items you have to delete them from the source location yourself.
Double-click on a folder or folder link to switch to display its contents.
Double-click on an image, text or sound file to open it in its corresponding editor.
Click on the info icon to show a preview and additional information about an item.
Item Popup Menu
Control-click on an item to get a popup menu with additional commands specific to the clicked item. You can copy the item's path or name to the clipboard for pasting in another location. You can duplicate, rename or delete this particular item (careful: delete will not ask you for confirmation.) Choose 'Save As...' to save the item to disk with a standard Finder dialog.
Choose 'Execute' to execute a shell script.
Backup and Restore
Choose 'Backup' from the item popup menu to make a backup copy of a file on the phone. It will get an _org_ prefix and will be saved in the same folder as the current file. In file manager lists, it will be displayed just before the current file. The backup will be done only if the _org_ file does not already exist, so this usually is indeed the original; of course you can edit, rename or delete this file as well. Choose 'Restore' from the menu for either the _org_ file or the current file, and the _org_ will be copied back to the current file.
The _org_ file's icon looks like a bomb (or maybe an O?) but is really an unbitten apple :-)
File Formats
Files on the phone are kept in strange and wonderful formats (probably to save space) that are not directly viewable or editable. iFuntastic automatically converts the files when it transfers them to disk.

- Most graphics are stored in a strange variant of the PNG format (.png)
- Property lists (.plist, .strings) are stored in binary format
- Voicemail files are stored in .amr format
- Many sounds are stored in .caf format

Luckily, the phone itself is flexible in that it accepts files in various formats. Generally file types are determined by the file extension, but many files contain so called 'magic numbers' that identify the format. In addition, file readers can often interpret files of various formats within a category. For example, the official wallpaper file is a JPEG file, but it can also be a PNG file (although the extension must remain .jpg.) Similarly, system sounds are in CAF format, but you can substitute AIFF files (again, while keeping the extension as .caf.) So that's cool, and makes our lives a lot easier. For more on that, please see also File Extensions.
Image Dimensions
Many graphics on the phone can be larger or smaller than the existing images on the phone. It can be great fun to experiment and find places where that applies. For example, the page indicators just above the dock have dimension 6 x 6 - make them taller and you can pretty much move them all the way up to underneath the status bar - make them wider and you can spread them across the whole screen.
Another observation: in various places the phone uses a one pixel wide image that gets stretched across the screen - for example, the LCD in the calculator. Replace it with a 320 pixel wide image, and all of a sudden you have a picture as LCD background instead of a uniform area. Cool, eh?
And the best part? With iFuntastic you have a very powerful tool that makes it easy to explore your phone and experiment!