iPhone app-dumping

Familiarize yourself with File Juicer. This application will dig through a binary finding all the text, images, movies, and sounds in any file. This is particularly revealing with iPhone applications. After syncing your iDevice, point File Juicer at the IPAs appearing in your ~/Music/iTunes/ MobileApplications folder.

The images to the right are from BoltCreative's Pocket God. The game is fun and the developers are great guys.

With File Juicer you'll get some insight into how some developers choose to build their tile sets and fonts. I was looking at the Rolando dump and a couple of things immediately struck me. First there is at least one easter egg in there. Secondly, HandCircus chose to repetitively duplicate screens over and over for localizations. Unclear why they didn't leave the screens void of text and localize at run time by drawing the fonts. This would have greatly reduced the binary image footprint.