I came, in my stumbling around for iPod innovation, across this neat snippet of code. It’s by Keith Wiley, who also has a method on his site for trapping fourdimensional objects and counting to 1023 on two hands, and 31 on one. I think he’s awesome already, big credit to him. Now, on to the code.


You will have to pick around some of the Mac-graphics-specific details, but the general math is the same. Note that my code produces final rgb values in the range [0-65535], not [0-1] or [0-255]. Adjust to your requirements. Sorry for the lack of commenting.



What does this do? Well, it essentially reverses everything iTunes does when it stores images on your iPod in the opaque ithmb format. This snippet of code ‘decodes’ the interlaced images of 720*480 (apparently, a TV format for the AV output), and there are a multitude of other sizes present in the files. What does this mean to me? Uh, I got to up the resolution of Timezones to let you be able to check it out in high resolution on a TV. You want that, right?

Now, actually, what I am going to do is reverse the coding of the tiniest thumbnail graphics – the one the iPod displays when you enter your Photo Library. You’ll see why, but it’s obvious that it’s usable for many cool things. I might open-source it.

Since the people at Macthemes already had the love, I have to share it with all my subscribers too. Man, I hope you buy in the next week, because you’ll get a beta invite for this;

Yeah, we’ve come a long way.