[sword-devel] iPhone dev (was: Re: MacSword2 early dev)

[Chris Little]

My perspective on a Sword port/frontend is that we have essentially two 
alternatives. There is nothing about the iPhone SDK that specifically 
precludes GPL software--rather the iPhone SDK NDA precludes any kind of 
code sharing. I have to hope that Apple will expire the NDA and make 
iPhone SDK development of GPL software possible. There's nothing 
particularly secret about the SDK anymore, the hardware and new OS are 
all out, etc.--so I'm not sure why it hasn't happened yet. That being 
the case, we have these two alternatives:

1) License the Sword library for closed source development (i.e. say to 
some subset of Sword developers, such as yourself, that they can develop 
a non-GPL Sword app). That would require removing all GPL code 
incorporated into Sword that CrossWire does not hold the copyright to. 
(And by "removing" I mean making it possible to build a library without 
them, not removing from SVN entirely.)

2) Develop Sword for iPhone using the GPL toolchain, which would require 
that any user have a jailbroken iPhone and use installer.app/Cydia to 
run our app. That would work fine for me--I know I'm going to jailbreak 
my iPhone once I get it--but it will severely limit our exposure.

I would much prefer Apple dump the NDA (or change the terms to make open 
source development and books on programming to the SDK possible) so that 
we can just do a nice GPL app in the App Store--and quickly shoot up to 
the top of the Bible App offerings. ;) I quite agree that the current 
Bible Apps are poor and/or over-priced. We can do better.

--Chris

Greg Hellings wrote:
> Manfred,
> 
> Where would the source for it be?  I remember you were working on
> pulling out just an Obj-C wrapper for the SWORD library which we had
> talked about as being possibly useful for working on the iPhone.  How
> mature is that wrapper at this point, and how can I locate and
> download it?  I'm once again trying to forge a path to see if GPLv2
> apps are possible on the device (I know v3 is not workable because of
> the application signing that Apple requires).  Since getting mine,
> I've been very disappointed that all of the Bible programs are either
> for-pay or have questionable quality of their modules (the only free
> Bible app for the iPhone is put out by the people over at youversion -
> and it requires you to have a good data connection and the quality of
> their modules is very poor so far).
> 
> --Greg
> 
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 2:35 AM, Manfred Bergmann <bergmannmd at web.de> wrote:
>> Sorry, removed from SourceForge because MacUpdate and Versiontracker
>> do automatic release scanning.
>> Trying to find another place to distribute development versions.
>>
>>
>> Manfred
>>
>>
>>
>> Am 22.07.2008 um 22:07 schrieb Manfred Bergmann:
>>
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> For all of you that are curious.
>>> A very early development version of the next major release of MacSword
>>> has been released (at sourceforge).
>>> Mainly to get feedback actually.
>>>
>>> It shouldn't break any existing MacSword installation but use with
>>> care.
>>>
>>> Currently only a single window bible view is implemented with
>>> features:
>>> - reference search
>>> - indexed search
>>> - view search
>>> - multiple parallel bible views
>>> - session storing
>>>
>>> There are no icons and the interface is very basic but it should give
>>> an introduction of how things will look like - almost.
>>> Ah, yes - this version will be Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) only.
>>>
>>> Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Manfred
>>>
>>>
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