[instaviz-users] Getting graphs out of Instaviz

[Glen Low]

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.

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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.

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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


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