I've now spent a good deal of time hunting and searching through the updated SpringBoard executable. Much of what I found is dull; some is useful. While hunting around during the adding-Apps-to-SpringBoard effort, I discovered a number of items that appeared to be new Safari-style protocol handlers.

These items were each listed near a host application, for example itms near com.apple.MobileStore. Not surprisingly, opening an itms:// URL launches the iTunes mobile store. Here are the working protocols, both old and new

itms:// Launches Mobile iTMS store.

maps:// Launches Google Maps. (iPhone only)

feed://, feeds:// Launches dotMac reader

tel:// Dials a number, specified in the URL. (iPhone only)

mailto:// Launches the iPhone mail app. (iPhone only)

youtube:// Launches YouTube.

Other items that were listed but do not seem to work are: calshow://, callto://, vmshow://, prefs://, nowplaying://

You never know when instant karma is gonna getcha. Take my playaudio application. Yesterday, I was chatting with some developer buddies about maybe putting together an Internet radio application and discussing the fact that the Celestial iPhone framework is essentially QuickTime repackaged. While talking, I decided to try using my existing playaudio app with a URL rather than a local audio file. So I typed the following at the iPhone command line:

playaudio http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/ne01/tjy/music/06.I%20Just%20Called%20To%20Say%20I%20Love%20You.mp3

And...it worked. Just like that, the instrumental-only cover began to play back through my iPhone speakers. Apparently, Apple has merged the concept of "local file" and "URL" a lot more closely than I'd thought. I haven't had any luck connecting to .pls or any other live radio feed but if you'd like to play back Internet-based files, playaudio works just fine.