[Drawkit] Is it "Touch" time?

[Dick Applebaum]

Graham,

With the advent of the iPad, I got to thinking about drawkit (again).

Now, with the latest beta, the SDK has added a slew of UIBezierPath functions (and other stuff).

I wonder if this changes the desirability and/or the porting effort??

Hope so!

Dick


On Jul 27, 2009, at 7:42 PM, Graham Cox wrote:

> The main problem for porting DK to the iPhone, which remains, is that the core drawing that DK does is heavily based on NSBezierPath rather than the lower level CGPath interfaces. Likewise DK uses NSGraphicsContext over CGContext, NSColor over CGColor and NSImage over CGImage.
> 
> If porting were attempted it would probably make most sense to recreate these objects rather than rewrite DK to use the CoreGraphics approach directly, simply because of the large amount of code that extends and uses NSBezierPath, and while we do not have access to the source of these, they are mostly simple wrappers around the CG code anyway, so it would be feasible to do, if a substantial effort.
> 
> I'm unsure why Apple chose to drop these from the iPhone APIs as they don't cause a major performance hit and are easier to use than the CG counterparts, but that's for them to know and us mortals to merely speculate and wonder. If I'd have known that Apple were planning to take this direction when I started DK I might have done things differently, but they didn't make that decision public until the SDK was released as usual.
> 
> We could also all file bug reports asking for the iPhone APIs to include NSBezierPath and the other higher level graphics APIs. You never know...
> 
> --Graham
> 
> 
> 
> On 28/07/2009, at 8:47 AM, Dick Applebaum wrote:
> 
>> AIR, the response I got from Graham was that the iPhone OS did not contain the necessary APIs/Frameworks to facilitate porting-- making the port effort a major rewrite (and distraction).
>> 
>> In the interim several things have happened:
>> 
>> -- The iPhone Hardware has been improved, specifically CPU, GPU, Compass and Camera
>> -- The iPhone OS has been enriched, incorporating more APIs from Mac OSX and new iPhone APIs and OpenGL ES 2.0
>> -- Apple claims that much of SnowLeopard has been re-implemented in Cocoa
>> -- Evidence is that Snow Leopard is incorporating some APIs and frameworks from the iPhone (they share some amount of a common code base)
>> 
>> 
>> Now, there are lots of rumors that Apple will soon announce a MultiTouch 10" Tablet device for delivery this year (lots of supplier rumors support this).
>> 
>> So, given this:
>> 
>> Is it practical, and is it time to port DrawKit to the Touch interface?
> 
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