On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 16:48, David Chisnall
<address@hidden> wrote:
It's something that we've discussed a few times. There are two requirements for porting iOS apps to Android with GNUstep:
- An implementation of UIKit (GNUstep has the AppKit framework from OS X, not the UIKit framework from iOS)
Regarding UIKit, I thought of starting the design around painting UIKit in generic OpenGL context, primarily because of heavy reliance on Core Animation. However, that's probably not a good idea because any Quartz implementation that GNUstep has would go unused in this scenario (and I'm not very good with maths that deal with painting curves et al).
I haven't dealt with Cairo yet; would Cairo be a good thing to paint UIKit with, instead of OpenGL?
- An Android back end (the part that handles drawing, window management, and event handling)
I am currently playing with the WebOS device that HP sent me. GNUstep-base seems to be working nicely on it, but it only provides two ways of communicating with user are via HTML5 or SDL. I will probably go the HTML5 route for now. I wanted the device to play with my Objective-C to _javascript_ converter. The Canvas API is basically a _javascript_ binding to CoreGraphics, so implementing CoreGraphics on top of it should be relatively trivial, and that would make porting iOS apps relatively painless. The same approach might work for Android, since it also has a WebKit / V8 browser...
Porting with Canvas API might be interesting, too. However, that would also be a limitation: what about embedded devices with no WebKit? WebKit is a larger thing to port than Cairo or software implementation of OpenGL/OpenGL ES
Targeting SDL and GL or SDL and Cairo might make things more universally portable.