do we need drawterm for the iphone? is anyone going to use it? I mean, it's a tiny screen, typing on handhelds sucks, plus is not that there is killer app Plan 9 has that you _must_ run.
am I forgetting something obvious? On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 5:57 PM, André Günther <andr...@gmx.de> wrote: > > Hi dear Plan9 fellows, > > my Name is André Günther. I'd like to participate in the gsoc with an > implementation of a drawterm on the iPhone platform. > > In this Mail I'd like to do the following 2 things: > 1) Say some words about me and motivation of this project. > 2) Present preliminary suggestion how I would proceed with the > project. > > I'd like to ask you to: > 1) Discuss if this project is actually wanted. > 2) If 1) is positive: Discuss my application. > > > Me and my Motivation: > I am 21 and an undergraduate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the > university of Freiburg. During the course of my studying i've been taking > several computer science classes. The reason I am not studying computer > science is, because I have the feeling for problem solving an autodidactic > method is sufficient for most cases and for which it is not I am taking > those specific classes. > I have about 8 years experience with programming C and working in unix like > environments. I am working on the mac platform for about 5 years now and > aquired some ObjC skills. That means I have done Cocoa development. So I am > familiar with apple like APIs and also the whole XCode environment. I > haven't done any iPhone development yet, but I am pretty confident, that I > can acquire those skills with my background in no time. (I have no apple > developer license for the iPhone, but I have an iPhone and I am able to test > custom applications on it. I would of course apply for a license if I do the > project) > Unfortunately I can't show you any recent work of mine, because it's all > internal university stuff I am doing for the lab, which I am not supposed to > post anywhere. > > I've been following Plan9 shallowly for some while now. But just recently > got more into it. I am using it exclusively in a Qemu/Drawterm fashion. I'd > like to explore more of Plan9 in the future. > Though I don't feel confident just now messing with kernel sources or other > important infrastructure, a drawterm port may just be the best thing to do. > My mac experiences will come in handy, too. > > Why is the port necessary? > Well Plan9 is awesome. Being able to drawterm into it with my iPhone would > be totally awesome. I don't know how you guys feel about this. Please > discuss! > > How to proceed: > Because I might have just failed with the above text, I don't want to go > into much detail now. Still a small outline here: > > I think there are two parts to the question: > 1) How does drawterm theoretically transform into an iPhone > application. > 2) What are the technical things to deal with > > 1) is much about interface design. Clearly the iPhone doesn't have a > keyboard nor a three button mouse. > For the keyboard it might be sufficient to provide the standard onscreen > keyboard apple provides. For the mouse I haven't yet wraped my mind around > the problem. Double tapping and gestures come to my mind though. Another > possibility would be to have onscreen virtual mouse buttons, but that might > be not the best solution. > Also Bladerunner type of zooming gestures might come into handy, with such a > tiny screen, which is clearly another limitation of the hardware platform. > > 2) The drawterm code base is pretty much self contained and C based. The > iPhone OS is pretty much a stripped down OSX and should be stable enough for > that and doesn't amount to much more than a recompile. > So the main part is providing the draw/audio and other devices. Reusing osx > code is not possible, because the iPhone doesn't share that particular API > the code base is using. > Here a new implementation using ObjC and the iPhone API is necessary. > > > Best wishes, > André Günther > -- Federico G. Benavento
