iPhone SDK Beta 5 is Out, Still Has Glaring Hole
Posted May 6th, 2008 @ 11:33pm by Erik J. Barzeski
The latest (beta 5) version of the iPhone SDK was released, and in a move that surprises absolutely nobody, synchronizing (or even copying) with a desktop app is still not possible.
There is still no way to even copy data from a desktop app to the iPhone (or vice versa). The most likely avenue for this would be via iTunes.
We simply need the ability to copy an XML file from our desktop app to our iPhone app's "space" and to copy a file from our iPhone app's space onto the computer. Why is this not possible?
Not everyone will have a "network" to send data, yet everyone will, from time to time, plug their phone in and synchronize it with iTunes.
At this point, I'm not even sure what we're going to do with our "mobile scorecard" application. Our intent was simply to allow people to enter their statistics on their iPhone, then copy the "round" back to their computer and import it into Scorecard. Simultaneously, we'd copy course data from Scorecard back to the iPhone so that the user had the latest list of courses (and tees) each time they connected their iPhone/iPod Touch to their computer.
Even if we could somehow guarantee network access to send rounds to the computer, sending courses/tees to the iP* remains a near impossibility.
Donate Life
Posted 08 May 2008 at 9:16am #
How about using a webservices and have people using the webservice to synch ?
Posted 08 May 2008 at 9:43am #
[quote comment="47610"]How about using a webservices and have people using the webservice to synch ?[/quote]
As I said above, there's no guarantee people with an iPod Touch will have any sort of network connectivity. They might not. Is relying on network connectivity a 95% solution? An 80% solution? 70%? A 90% solution, but only 50% of the time?
It is guaranteed that everyone will connect their iPhone or iPod Touch to the darn computer, though. That's a 100% solution.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 3:53pm #
Can the Touch access the computer's network connection while connected? If so, you could just make the syncing service be a network service served from the user's computer, and have the Touch access it using the "network" when it's connected.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 4:00pm #
[quote comment="47614"]Can the Touch access the computer's network connection while connected?[/quote]
No, it can't. I thought for a second that you may be on to something, but I don't think you are.
iPhones and iPod Touches (iP*s) work with iPhoto, too, so I'm curious now if we need to rely on iTunes at all or if we can somehow just use a mounted iP* and perform the actions directly from within our application.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 6:40pm #
You can talk to the iPhone's filesystem by reverse-engineering Apple's AFC Framework. MacFUSE's iPhoneDrive does this, and I extended their work a bit and made this little open source program/framework:
http://www.kennettnet.co.uk/code/iphone/
Posted 08 May 2008 at 10:55pm #
[quote comment="47618"]You can talk to the iPhone's filesystem by reverse-engineering Apple's AFC Framework.[/quote]
And for Windows? 🙂
Posted 09 May 2008 at 5:42am #
[quote comment="47619"]And for Windows? :-)[/quote]
I've written code (In .NET), but not released it yet. Drop me an email if you're interested.