iPhone App

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org>wrote:


> On Mar 28, 2012, at 5:44 PM, Arthaey Angosii wrote:
>
> Are there any plans to make something SignWriting-related for the
> iPhone? Dictionary, writing tools, etc… Arthaey
>
> 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…
>

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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