[instaviz-users] Getting graphs out of Instaviz

[Michael C. Mancini]

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
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>
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