Friday, March 07, 2008

Re-imagining a Desktop Utility into Cocoa Touch

If anybody's starting up a business based around iPhone development, and need a chief engineer, I'm sure you can find my e-mail address.


Well the momentous day came, and the iPhone SDK is in our hands. I wish I were not so incredibly busy at my day job, or I would take a couple weeks off and learn the ins and outs. But, I've decided I should start small and port a little application I wrote, Remote Remote GH for MythTV, which I'm afraid I have not been properly maintaining, but has the advantage that it would be much more useful on an iPhone than on a laptop, and it only uses Cocoa and various Core Foundation routines. I'm going to go through the exercise here of paring the interface down to size and making it more in touch with the Touch's way of doing things. Then sometime in the next couple months, I'll take the time to actually do it.


Let's look at the original and see how we can get it down to 320x460 and 480x300 (which are about the available sizes once you discount the "status bar" region of the display). Not only do you have a smallish screen, there is inconvenient text entry, and any widget on screen should be at least 44x44 pixels to deal with the stubby fingers of adult humans. On the plus side, there is multi-touch and 3D movement via the accelerometer.



  • Disconnect/Connect Button This should probably be done away with entirely, and the app should try to keep a connection up when visible.
  • Show Keys Button This brings up a list of keyboard keys which are appropriate for the current state of the MythTV. The idea was for the user to control the MythTV with the same key presses used when sitting in front of the computer running the MythTV frontend. Keyboard input on the iPhone being discouraged, replacement with a series of contextually appropriate button panels is appropriate. (A panel for watching recordings, a panel for navigating, a panel for DVDs, etc.)
  • Scrolling Status Console This was a area devoted to telling the user what has happened. This can be condensed into a 2 line status widget at the bottom of each screen.
  • Navigation Buttons Live TV, DVD, etc., can be put into a standard navigation bar, to allow the user to jump to a common task, which I will pare to Live TV, Recordings and Video
  • Recorded Programs Table This can be moved to its own panel, and condensed, with perhaps a sub-panel which the user can navigate to with more complete information for each recorded program.
  • Big Scrub Bar I like the idea of making very long scrub bars to allow for fine control over where in a program the user can jump. This is a good candidate for a control which is always along the long axis regardless of the orientation of the device, and will only be visible in play back mode panels.


As I said, I have very little time on hand, but I was able to make a first step of compiling my network protocol classes, which compiled after a mere 5 code changes—removing #include "Cocoa/Cocoa.h", and replacing call to Carbon's NewPtr(...)/DisposePtr(...) with malloc(...)/free(...).

Then it was just a copy/paste job to make a stripped down version of my original application delegate, which just stuffed replies from the server into a simple UILabel in my main window. Amazingly, this worked on the second try, with a connection forming with the server, followed by periodic requests for status. If anything, the networking code is more solid than in the desktop application.

I'll update this later, as I start to build the GUI, and figure out how best to minimize my power usage (keeping the Wi-Fi unit off for extended periods).