[sword-devel] iPhone Frontend

[Greg Hellings]

Ian,

I had planned to respond - but I got caught up in the things of school
and life.  Myself, Manfred and a few of those who had been working
with MacSword in the past had been talking about developing an iPhone
front-end, but I haven't had time to learn the iPhone libraries from
the ground up (I'm not a Cocoa programmer, so the whole delegate
system is foreign to me).  I'll be done with school in May, at which
time I'll be able to give more to the SWORD project that involves
learning the new technologies.

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Ian Wagner <IWAGN973 at students.bju.edu> wrote:
> Hey guys, I posted to the list a week or two ago about the possibility
> of an iPhone frontend and just wanted to give you guys an update and
> get some feedback. I worked on the project over the weekend a bit and
> have a usable proof of concept ready. The module text renders fine one
> chapter at a time on the screen, navigation buttons are in place for
> next/previous chapter, and a module selection screen allows the user
> to select the active module. Searching, bookmarks, a good method for
> selection of text, and a module downloader system are on my TODO list
> for now.

This is very impressive.  I've given the module download system some
thought.  There is already a system in the SWORD library to allow for
it.  However, it requires libcurl or its own built-in ftplib, and I
believe both of those would use BSD sockets.  From my reading in the
iPhone documentation, using any function calls lower than CFNetworking
are only available over Wi-Fi.  However, CFNetworking has built-in
support for HTTP and FTP.  So you could either use the built-in SWORD
library downloading scheme for now, and only be able to access over a
Wi-Fi connection, or you could rewrite the system using CFNetworking
classes to allow for data to be transferred over the cell networks
also.  Or, you could use the built-in system for now and then add
support for a CFNetworking option in a later stage of the coding.

>
> I have a few questions about what the next steps in the process are
> though. First off, has anyone determined if we can distribute a GPL'd
> iPhone app? From what I can make of it as long as the source is
> available on the web or something then it is GPL-compliant (this is
> what the people at Wordpress have done so it seems ok to me, but I
> thought I should double-check). Second, I am wondering if I am to
> develop this independently or if there is an official method for
> developing SWORD frontends. I have an iPhone dev license and would
> really like to see a SWORD frontend for these devices.

My communications with the Apple Developer Connection people about the
status of GPL software on the iPhone lead to them simply telling me to
ask my legal counsel.  Unfortunately, I don't have the money available
to me to pay legal counsel to answer that question.  If I were you,
I'd scour Linux.com or put in a question to the GNU people about it,
since those were the groups initially responsible for the articles
about GPL's incompatibility with the iPhone developer program.
However, my understanding of Apple's announcement a few weeks back was
that they wanted to have GPL software available through the iTunes
Store, so I think you're safe to proceed.  At the least, for now,
those of us who are also ADC members are legally allowed to see the
code.  You may just have to make that a requirement for access to the
code until you can sort out the question firmly.

--Greg

>
> Thanks and God bless,
> Ian
> ---------------
> There's no place like 127.0.0.1
>
>
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