Re: [9fans] GSOC: Drawterm for the iPhone

["Federico G. Benavento" <benavento@gmail.com>]

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 <Andre.G@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