[Bf-committers] BlenderPocket and iPhone/iTouch

[Salvatore Russo]

Hi,

I recently bought an iPod Touch and this device is really cool: the 
screen is wonderful and the usability with the multi touch interface is 
impressing. And naturally, my first idea was to play with Blender on 
this clean device ;) So I am currently analyzing the situation to 
understand how much work it would be to make Blender work on this new toy.

 From my previous work on BlenderPocket for Windeows Mobile, what should 
be reusable is:
my OpenGL wrapper to extend OpenGL ES,
some optimizations for small screen/resource device,
the understanding of the Ghost library,

But the first difficulties that I see are:
0) iPhone OS is not a so open platform and to install Blender on it, you 
will have to jailbreak it.
1) iPhone OS is using Cocoa and not carbon,
2) it will not be possible anymore (as in my previous version of 
BlenderPocket) to use hardware buttons to emulate shift/control/alt: I 
will have to find an “easy” way to use Blender only with multi touch screen.
3) I still have to investigate how to have phython on iPhone OS
4) For this version, if it works, I would try to extend BlenderPocket to 
the game engine...

It seems that some work was successfully done around the port of Ghost 
for cocoa as written here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:SundayMeetingAgenda/2008-08-17th
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Blender/Architecture/CocoaBlender

It would help me if I could have access to the source code of the ghost 
cocoa version (even in alpha/beta status) in order to perform some 
additional analysis. Is it available somewhere? I tried to contact 
Mrrage without success...

Feel free to send me any suggestions that I will consider carefully.

Good luck in your work on Blender 2.5!

Salvatore
http://russose.free.fr/