Thursday 25 June 2009

Sharing data between Mixtikl Windows and Mixtikl iPhone/iPod

While waiting for the skins and Tiklpaks for Mixtikl 1.5 to pull-together, I've been continuing to fill-out the outer edges of Mixtikl. I spent the past week adding-in code that allows Mixtikl on Windows to share data with Mixtikl on iPhone/iPod; this was a lot harder than I wanted, as it involved both bonjour code and the creation of a mini HTTP server, which are things you get "out of the box" with XCode for Mac/iPhone, and which are hard to implement on Windows (to say the least!). Still, the code to do the file sharing all now seems to be working and I'll spend a day or 2 more on testing/tweaking it.

I remain amazed that the iPhone SDK makes it so difficult to share data with the desktop. On Windows Mobile, you can get data on and off via your PC using Active Sync and Windows Explorer; albeit, there is no simple way to get data on/off your Mac (if you have one!) short of installing Windows on your Mac through a VM or Boot Camp. On the iPhone/iPod, your app sits there in its own island, unable to communicate even with a Mac without a large amount of code being written for both Mac and iPhone. And if you want your iPhone/iPod app to communicate with a Windows box, well you're in a world of hurt from a coding perspective.

The good news for us is that now we've done the hard work, I think we'll be able to quite easily roll-out useful utilities within Mixtikl, that will allow quite a lot useful stuff to be done on iPhone/iPod/Windows Mobile - and shared/worked-on on the PC/Mac, as best suits the needs of the user...

2 comments:

ashley said...

As always, can't wait, it just keeps sounding better and better.

Pete Cole said...

Cheers! You wouldn't believe how hard work it all is. :)