Your iPhone, You're Doing it Wrong: Part 1

It’s true. You depend on one program to manage and sync all of your photos, apps, movies and contacts and then don't know what the hell to do when you want to do it all over again on another computer. Shame on you!

This will be a 2 part post on how to stop doing that. The first part will be the set up. You don't need the bloated install of iTunes to do what you want to with your iDevice. The programs that I will be going over work with iPhone and/or iPods. And I will be letting you know what I use on my iPhone 3gs to get around the whole iTunes thing and its library issues. My phone is jailbroken, however. So some things may not be possible to do for you if you do not have a jailbroken device. And I will not be talking about how to do something similar with your device if it is not jailbroken.

A bit of back-story on why I had to get an iTunes replacement; this all started when work, the place that employees me and pays me money, said that I can't have iTunes installed on the laptop that they gave me and that it is now against company policy if I install it on there again. So, since I enjoy getting money and supporting my lovely wife and children, I complied. It was rough, but I did manage to fill the hole in my technology heart that iTunes left.

First things first; UNINSTALL ITUNES!!! The end goal of this is to be able to connect my iPhone to any computer and still have my iPhone be able to communicate back and forth without having to use a program that wasn't even designed for a pc; iTunes. For this to happen, you still do need some things that iTunes puts onto your computer. But that’s the easy part.

To do this, just download the latest and greatest version of iTunes. It actually doesn't matter what version since we aren't going to do a full install of it. It’s just easier to get the latest version since it’s available on apple's site.
Once downloaded, change the name of the file from iTunesSetup.exe to iTunesSetup.zip. You can actually use any compression program; I just use zip because that's what I have. Once you have the name changed, unzip it to a directory of your choice and open that directory. I used to create a new folder and put the zip into that folder and did 'extract to here'. But you can do that in two clicks. Just right-click on the .zip and select 'extract to blah/' where blah is the name of what you want to unzip. This will make a folder on your desktop called blah and everything that is in the .zip will be in the blah folder.

What you want to do now is install only what is needed in order for your iPhone to talk to the programs that we will be covering in the part 2 of this post. Out of all the programs you unzipped, you want to install just Bonjour.msi and AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi. And that’s it! Those TWO programs are all that’s needed!! That pretty amazing since iTunes will tax any pc to its limits when syncing and all you need now are TWO programs to help replace it!

Anywho, the major thing that I don't like are auto updates. So be sure to read the check boxes carefully and be sure to turn off any auto update feature and anything else you may not be comfy with.

And that’s it! You are now half way to being iTunes free!! Take a break now and get some coffee, because that's what I’m going to do right now! :P