I found somebody had got perl in a more or less usable state on the iPhone fw 2.x. So I was able to make my calendar sync script work again. From the command line. Now what about wrapping your shell or perl or [insert your favourite scripting language here] script with a beautiful splash screen and an icon to start it from the SpringBoard.
Easy! You need
- A graphic designer, who can produce
- an icon.png, and
- a splash screen saved as Default.png
Stuff these, (no, not the designer) together with your somethingnice.pl in a new directory /Applications/SomethingNice.app. Than add an XML file called Info.plist. There’s a boilerplate below, shamelessly stolen from a reply on this blog post. Finally, use for example BossPrefs to respring, and you’re done. Tap the icon and watch the splash screen while the script runs in the background.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleExecutable</key> <string>Nameofscripthere.sh</string> <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> <string>com.authorsname.ProgramName</string> <key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key> <string>6.0</string> <key>CFBundlePackageType</key> <string>APPL</string> <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key> <string>1.0.0</string> <key>CFBundleSignature</key> <string>????</string> <key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>1.0</string> </dict> </plist>