1 reply to this topic

[Rockneosx]

Greetings, Evan. Congratulations on your recent iPhone acquisition. I, myself, will be getting the 3G as soon as it becomes available.

Quote

I bought an iPhone at Macworld and just couldn't seem to put it down. It so seriously needs something like Spell Catcher's glossary feature (at least) I wanted to take a serious look at developing for it.

It's really, really welcome you are considering development for the iPhone! I would kill for Spell Catcher being on the this revolutionary device. But do you think it even doable? As a non programmer I couldn't even hazard a guess, but I caught this little snip-it about the iPhone over on O'Grady's Apple Core page which gave me pause. It reads in part as follows:

"The lack of multi-tasking memory-resident applications will most likely prevent the possibility of applications that offer alternate input methods, copy and paste, voice recognition, voice dialing, GPS navigation, other email programs, macro programs, text-to-speech and instant messenging clients.
The only applications that currently run in the background (or have background helpers) are Mail, SMS, Phone, Clock and iPod. All other iPhone/iPod touch applications quit as soon as you go to the home screen, and according to Jon Gruber “you don’t really notice because they launch fast, quit fast, and save automatically”

Any thoughts to date, realizing you have likely not had much time to devote to exploring this yet?

Thanks in advance for anything you care to share.

Rock

[Evan Gross]

Rockneosx, on Jun 20 2008, 11:37 AM, said:

Greetings, Evan. Congratulations on your recent iPhone acquisition. I, myself, will be getting the 3G as soon as it becomes available.

Quote

I bought an iPhone at Macworld and just couldn't seem to put it down. It so seriously needs something like Spell Catcher's glossary feature (at least) I wanted to take a serious look at developing for it.

It's really, really welcome you are considering development for the iPhone! I would kill for Spell Catcher being on the this revolutionary device. But do you think it even doable? As a non programmer I couldn't even hazard a guess, but I caught this little snip-it about the iPhone over on O'Grady's Apple Core page which gave me pause. It reads in part as follows:

"The lack of multi-tasking memory-resident applications will most likely prevent the possibility of applications that offer alternate input methods, copy and paste, voice recognition, voice dialing, GPS navigation, other email programs, macro programs, text-to-speech and instant messenging clients.
The only applications that currently run in the background (or have background helpers) are Mail, SMS, Phone, Clock and iPod. All other iPhone/iPod touch applications quit as soon as you go to the home screen, and according to Jon Gruber “you don’t really notice because they launch fast, quit fast, and save automatically”

Any thoughts to date, realizing you have likely not had much time to devote to exploring this yet?

Thanks in advance for anything you care to share.

Rock

My main mission at WWDC was to find out what can and can't be done, as far as a product like Spell Catcher on the iPhone.

Given that I'm under NDA for anything I learned or discussed at WWDC, I have to be pretty vague and careful about what I say...

Anyway, obviously the most obvious (and apparently desired) product for the iPhone would be something with Spell Catcher's shorthand glossary functionality. For various reasons (not so much the "background app" issue you mention), it's not a possibility at this point in time. At least, there's no way to do it without violating the rules regarding what can be sold on the App Store. Sigh.

Still, this is a major opportunity for small developers like ourselves, and I do plan on doing something for the platform. Too early to say anything more, I still have to get Spell Catcher X 10.3 out the door...