iPad?

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Simon Urbanek
On Jan 30, 2010, at 2:00 AM, Byron Ellis wrote:

Erm... Not so difficult, the iPhone toolchain is using gcc and it wouldn't be hard to make an ARM gfortran... I think Simon did on a lark when the iPhone came out.

Indeed, R has no crucial issues on arm - the support is there from the times of the iPhone and it works with the stock Apple SDK. The usability issue was the main reason to not pursue this further. That is different for the iPad as it has a multi-core CPU, better FPU and a decent screen with a keyboard so it would make much more sense. Clearly, we'd have to add a UIKit ?implementation of Quartz and maybe an UIKit console, but it certainly more reasonable than on the iPhone.

The graphics dev shouldn't be too bad, most everything we need is
there. Added bonus: a controlled font list so fewer issues there. :-)

A console would be more work than on OS X I think, but not too bad.
That said, I still think the more sensible approach is the remote-GUI one (Byron is the expert on this ;)).
I don't think the iPhone SDK implemented the NSDIstantObject classes
so it wouldn't be quite as easy as the desktop version. I've actually
been thinking about cloud-based analysis quite a bit for a variety of
reasons and I think I would do it like DabbleDb with some sort of
database (or data document) facility. You'd spin up a "virtual
machine" (which may or may not be an actual virtual machine) with a
true copy (or copies) of R with a remote connection REPL instead of
the normal one. You'd then use sticky sessions to bind your client to
that specific copy (or copies) of R so your client could interact with
the system in the normal fashion, shipping output from graphics back
and forth to different things.

The real problem is actually getting it onto the App Store since R is not allowed given current rules (no programming languages). Interestingly, if you were to use R to build an application that was NOT a programming language, that would be fine. (there are Smalltalk and Mono-based Apps in the store).

I don't think the programming language would be the main concern (that's something we could talk to Apple about - they usually like scientific apps), but I suspect they may have more objections to the dynamic linking that R uses - I don't think they would let us download/use packages.
True, they do like education/science... Good point about the packages
though. Perhaps pure-R only packages would be OK? Really no different
than buying extra levels in a game or something.... Use the in-app
purchase capability?
Cheers,
Simon

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:45 PM, David Winsemius
<dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
On Jan 29, 2010, at 11:06 PM, Matthew Cohen wrote:

I think it might be worthwhile to think about getting R to work on the
iPad, especially if it can access iWork/Numbers spreadsheets... ?I realize
someone brought up trying this on the iPhone a couple of years back, and no
one was able to figure out what the point would be. ?But R on the iPad seems
like it would be genuinely useful...

I'm not sure that I have much to contribute in terms of making this
happen, but I'm wondering if anyone who is familiar with the iPhone SDK
(especially anyone who has played around with 3.2) knows how feasible it
would be...
Show us an open-source C and Fortran compiler for the iPad.

--

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT

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--
Byron Ellis (byron.ellis at gmail.com)
"Oook" -- The Librarian

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Byron Ellis (byron.ellis at gmail.com)
"Oook" -- The Librarian

iPad?

Thread (6 messages)