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From: Bianca Gibson on 12 May 2010 09:20
As well as meeting apples requirements, an issue with a straight port
is that it must be usable with a touch screen. Assuming that, like the
iPod touch (yuck) that it's just a big version of, it does not come
with a stylus, most users won't be using one. The sheer imprecision of
fingers has the potential to cause sever problems with the menus. I
don't fancy trying to use my touch screen calculator with a very
similar menu system without the stylus. I would get infuriated, and
I'd imagine it would be the same on an iPad. The interface would need
work.



On 11 May 2010 09:17, John W Kennedy <jwkenne(a)attglobal.net> wrote:
> On May 10, 2010, at 6:00 PM, RA Brown wrote:
> Bruce Martin wrote:
>>> As I understand it, an iPAD is a hand held MP3 player. This is not to be confused with an iPAQ, made by Hewlett-Packard. The latter device is a PDA that uses Windows Mobile as an O.S. and links on windows with MS Outlook, amongst other things. The capabilities of the latter are much more than the iPAD as far as I know, but the price is also accordingly much more.
>>
>> An iPAD is the newest release from Apple.  It is basically a table PC with a touch screen or an advanced book reader.  It uses WiFi to connect to the Internet for web browsing.
>
> Optionally, it can use 3G in addition to WiFi.
>
>>  It can connect to a Mac using firewire to sync files.
>
> USB, not Firewire, and it can connect to Windows, too. (It uses a traditional iPod/iPhone cable.)
>
>>  I am not sure what other apps can be loaded.
>
> Pretty much any iPhone or iPod Touch app that is not directly dependent on specific hardware requirements (for example, only the iPhone has full telephony) will run on the iPad. Many developers for iPhone OS are now upgrading their apps to have iPad modes (which basically means nothing more than recognizing and taking advantage of the much larger screen).
>
> Mac OS X and iPhone OS, on the other hand, are not compatible. To begin with, Mac OS X runs on Intel x86 or x64 (or PowerPC, but not anymore), while iPhone OS runs on ARM. But there is a large overlap of function at the source level, iPhone OS being pretty much a proper subset of Mac OS X when it comes to things like strings and encoding, date and time handling, localization, and file and memory management. At the GUI level, Mac OS X and iPhone OS are not compatible, but they are generally analogous.
>
> --
> John W Kennedy
> A proud member of the reality-based community.
>
>
>
>
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From: jonathon on 12 May 2010 10:53
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On 05/10/2010 09:53 PM, RA Brown wrote:

> Porting to the iPAD would require special approval from Apple and is not likely to happen.

What requires special approval is getting it into the Apple iPad store.

The iPad store rules theoretically prohibit any application that
interprets code. This would, in theory, exclude any application that
utilizes macros, or allows macros to be created.

What Apple would like to do, is mandate that all software for the iPad
be written in Objective C. What they compromised on, was a very short
list of languages, which pointedly excluded scripting languages.

That said, rewriting OOo in Objective C, and eliminating the
dependencies on Mono and Java that is has, would be a good thing for a
number of reasons. (I just realized that ADA is not on the list of
approved languages for the iPad. Pity,because that language mandates
secure, stable code.)

jonathon
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From: John W Kennedy on 12 May 2010 15:01
On May 12, 2010, at 10:53 AM, jonathon wrote:
> The iPad store rules theoretically prohibit any application that
> interprets code. This would, in theory, exclude any application that
> utilizes macros, or allows macros to be created.

The last I heard is that they don't allow an application that can interpret /downloaded/ code. There is certainly an accepted engine for the Z-machine (the engine developed by Infocom for their famous games, which was long ago reverse-engineered, and for which many post-Infocom games have been written).

> (I just realized that ADA is not on the list of
> approved languages for the iPad. Pity,because that language mandates
> secure, stable code.)

I don't think it would be very useful. All the UI components of the iPhone OS API are implemented using Objective-C objects, and these are battery-powered machines that are mainly intended for UI-heavy activity, so writing in any language but Objective-C (or Objective-C++) is swimming upstream.

There are at least two interpreted languages that are supported for certain purposes; they are included in the system: JavaScript and SQL.

--
John W Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has become full of /Pooh./"
-- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface




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From: "Douglas St.Clair" on 12 May 2010 09:34

I'm quite happy with an iPod touch which is essentially an iphone with no phone. There are two things that make precision on that tiny screen work. First when the placement of an i-beem cursor is needed you get your finger near the word and a magnifying glass opens just above or beside your finger letting you easily place the i-been between two letters. Second is the keyboard works along the long axis of the screen. (Turn the device from portrait to landscape and the image turns to follow.) When you press a letter of course your finger covers a couple of the keys but the key you are pressing is enlarged and appears clearly off to the side of your finger. The iPad also has a doc and with the dock supports a full size keyboard. They both also support bluetooth and so I assume bluetooth keyboard and mouse support is possible although I have never checked to see if it is.

On May 12, 2010, at 9:20 AM, Bianca Gibson wrote:

> As well as meeting apples requirements, an issue with a straight port
> is that it must be usable with a touch screen. Assuming that, like the
> iPod touch (yuck) that it's just a big version of, it does not come
> with a stylus, most users won't be using one. The sheer imprecision of
> fingers has the potential to cause sever problems with the menus. I
> don't fancy trying to use my touch screen calculator with a very
> similar menu system without the stylus. I would get infuriated, and
> I'd imagine it would be the same on an iPad. The interface would need
> work.

Captain Nice
cptn.nice(a)gmail.com

"I love my computer, because my friends live in it!"


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