Sunset Lake Software - Comments for "Core Plot and WWDC"

No, this requires

No, this requires Apple-specific frameworks like Core Animation to work. You might as well write your own implementation from scratch for Android, given how different of a development environment it presents.

Will this also work with the

Will this also work with the google G1? If so, my team could build upon it.

Wrapping a command-line tool

Wrapping a command-line tool would be unacceptable for what we're trying to do here. We want drop-in user interface elements that can be used in any Cocoa application on Mac or iPhone and can be set up by developers in a manner similar to how table views and the like are used right now. We don't just want to generate static images to be hosted within a larger user interface.

By leveraging modern Cocoa technologies like Core Animation, we will be able to provide crisp graphics that can be animated around or interacted with in many ways. To do this requires building our own framework from the ground up.

There are also performance and portability concerns with bringing something like Gnuplot across to the iPhone.

Quite frankly, Cocoa gives us a lot for free, which makes writing something like this require far fewer lines of code than a library like Gnuplot. In a matter of months we've been able to produce some impressive-looking graph elements, such as the ones shown here.

Naive question here, but why

Naive question here, but why not create a new terminal type for gnuplot? I just did a size on gnuplot on my intel macbook:

size /opt/local/bin/gnuplot
__TEXT	__DATA	__OBJC	others	dec	hex
1126400	90112	4096	102400	1323008	143000

It seems like it could be wrapped for cocoa, as was done for python etc.
The number of person-years invested in gnuplot must be huge, if you expect to match it in a timely fashion, I would say that is impossible. But leveraging gnuplot, now that seems possible by experienced coders. But I am an old fortran coder. :-)