On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Valerie Sutton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sutton@signwriting.org">sutton@signwriting.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><div><div class="im"><div>On Mar 28, 2012, at 5:44 PM, Arthaey Angosii wrote:</div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="im">Are there any plans to make something SignWriting-related for the<br>
</div>iPhone? Dictionary, writing tools, etc… Arthaey</div></blockquote></div></div>Regarding a SignWriting app for the iPad… Yesterday for the first time, I heard that a German programmer has developed or is developing a SignWriting app for the iPad…</div>
</blockquote><div><br>That's intriguing news. iPads (and other possibly tablets) offer SignWriting users a nice platform to work with. A long time ago I designed (but never programmed) a SignWriting app for the old Palm range of PDAs. The problems were legion size of screen, slow processing speed, difficult programming environment, etc etc. iPads in contrast have a good screen size, relatively fast processing (allowing almost full multi-tasking/multi-programming capabilities), an improving programming environment, etc etc. Palm devices didn't really allow data sharing -- you had to back up the SD card or use a docking station and then manually copy the data over to a desktop --- but iPads with Dropbox or Apple's own iCloud make data sharing easier.<br>
<br>One SignWriting app I'd love to see on the iPad using the on-board camera(s) to record video clips, replay those clips while the user hand-wrote (finger traced) the matching SignWriting before finally a hand-writing recogniser converts it all to beautiful SignWriting (probably as SVG). Once the signs were transcribed the app could then hook into SignPuddle or other web-based tools for upload to those public resources. <br>
<br>Mocking up that app's interface in Apple's Xcode development tool using storyboards would be trivial but actually implementing the functionality much much harder. Maybe Apple's Chinese character recogniser could be tweaked to recognise SignWriting instead, which would make the hand-written part somewhat easier to develop. If it could also run on Macs (perhaps using the Magic Trackpad for input) how wonderful would that be. Possibly scale down to an iPhone too. Sadly it's very unlikely that time would allow me to create such an app; too much interpreting work to do and not enough hours in the day for coding. Well I can design and dream. And in the mean time wait to see what this rumored app can actually do.<br>
<br>I can also dream that as Google Android tablets become as functional as iPads that maybe the app might port over there too. But that really would be a dream; I own Macs, iPad, and iPhone but have no intention of becoming Androidic.<br>
<br></div></div>Regards, Trevor.<br><br><>< Re: deemed!<br>