[instaviz-users] Getting graphs out of Instaviz

[Seng Kian Gan]

Hi Glen

Don't know if you know this, but you could actually capture a screen  
shot of your finished graph by pressing the Home button and Power  
button simultaneously on your iPhone/iTouch. This will be captured on  
to your photo app in the iPhone/iTouch. Then from there open up the  
photo and email it!
But of course you can't edit it!

S.K.


On 28/11/2008, at 12:56 AM, Michael C. Mancini wrote:

> Hi Glen,
>
> I think photo exporting would be awesome.  I'm thinking it would be
> useful if I was at a meeting where I drew up a graph, I could then
> email the photo to the meeting attendees.  For the actual syncing, I
> think syncing through the iPhone backups to an integrated importer in
> graphviz would be all I would need to make me happy.
>
> Mike M.
>
> --
> Michael C. Mancini
> michael.mancini at bme.gatech.edu
>
>
>
> On 26 Nov 2008, at 10:09, Glen Low wrote:
>
>> Hi All
>>
>> Mostly a technical FYI cum rant about graph exporting but your
>> opinions are welcome.
>>
>> I'd like to ship 1.0 with some form of graph exporting, but the  
>> issues
>> are technically harder than I expected.
>>
>> =====
>>
>> EMAIL
>>
>> Ideally you should be able to click on a button somewhere and  
>> Instaviz
>> packages up the graph into an email to be sent out.
>>
>> But:
>>
>> 1.	The inbuilt Mail can't be told programmatically to send emails  
>> with
>> attachments. (Go figure!)
>> 2.	You can of course use SMTP to communicate with a mail server but:
>> 	a.	There's no SMTP libraries on the released public API of iPhone
>> 	b.	I can't run binaries on the thing, despite it being Unix.
>> 	c.	Apparently (I can't confirm this though), iPhone in 3G or Edge
>> mode doesn't understand TCP/IP. So any third-party library that uses
>> low-level BSD type sockets will fail, it has to use the higher level
>> network API's that hide all the 3G / Edge stuff.
>> 	d.	c. rules out most open-source libraries like libsmtp etc. (unless
>> they are clever enough to abstract away the transport details.)
>> 	e.	Someone wrote an iPhone-compatible Objective-C library that does
>> SMTP. But it's very, very new, and I fear the edge cases of SMTP.
>> 	f.	Final nail in the coffin: the user has to enter his SMTP details
>> all over again.
>> 3.	Some one suggested sending the graph to a web server and then the
>> web server emails the graph out.
>> 	a.	Sounds like a recipe for getting blacklisted in a spam list...
>> 	b.	While I'd love for there to be zillions of Instaviz users, at the
>> back of my mind I'd be worried about my bandwidth bills.
>> 	c.	Anyone know of any web service that does this already?
>> 4.	I could implement a URL handler for instaviz and email a specially
>> coded URL with instaviz://... in it. That means only Instaviz users
>> (for now) would be able to see these graphs, and there's just so much
>> gobbledegook you'd end up seeing in your email.
>>
>> =====
>>
>> WEBDAV
>>
>> On a Mac, you could start web sharing which starts the Apache server.
>> I'm not sure though that it has WebDAV enabled out of the box. Other
>> places that will use WebDAV: MobileMe, Windows Web Sharing(?) etc.
>>
>> Definitely worth doing, but in order to get a good working
>> implementation of sync through WebDAV, I need the time to get it
>> right. Something for v 2.0.
>>
>> =====
>>
>> BACKUP SYNC
>>
>> It turns out when you backup your iPhone or iPod (this happens
>> automatically every time you sync), iTunes writes out all the
>> appropriate files into your Mac or PC. Some of which would be the
>> Instaviz graph files! (Which are really just regular Graphviz .gv
>> files.) I'm thinking of writing a simple Instaviz Helper app, which
>> you'd run on your Mac or PC and it would offer to export or print out
>> the graphs found in your backup.
>>
>> There's the minor danger that Apple will change the way backups work
>> of course.
>>
>> I will probably work on this for the 1.0 release, but bear in mind it
>> is one-way i.e. from iPhone to PC/Mac, not the other way around.
>>
>> ======
>>
>> EXPORT TO PHOTOS
>>
>> I think it's possible to export to the Photo app on the iPhone, but
>> then again the exported graphics couldn't be edited as graphs  
>> anymore.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers, Glen Low
>>
>>
>> ---
>> pixelglow software | simply brilliant stuff
>> www.pixelglow.com
>> aim: pixglen
>>
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