phideltacity

I finally have gotten my grubby little hands on an actual iPad. Having played with it for a while and learned some of its features and intricacies, I have come to the conclusion, that the Bounty I had previously offered may have been beside the mark. So I wish to chain it slightly.

Of course the original bounty and rues still hold. All I would like to do is enhance the offering so that the criteria can be met in a slightly different way.

I have come to realize, that the iPad actually has a great way for applications to share documents. It does that without exposing a full fledged structured file system. This is no mean feat and I admire both the courage and ingenuity on Apple’s part for devising this scheme. It is done by applications registering to handle files of certain types. Once that is done, other applications can send files to those applications for further treatment.

This opens a new possibility for solving the issue at hand for me (developing software not for, but rather on the iPad). The bounty asked for a single app. However the same aim could be achieved with 2 (or more?) smaller dedicated apps as well.

One of them would simply need to be able to handle SVN repositories. It would need to do checkouts, updates, checkins and all the other neat SVN stuff. Of course it would need to handle both http as well as https (including SSL-Client-Certificate authentication). To be useful it would need to be able to send files that have been checked out to other application(s) for viewing and editing. This has been implemented already by the guys at DropBox, so it is definitely possible.

The second dedicated application would then be a code editor that supports that same mechanism of accepting files and saving them back to their original location. The actual editor could then focus on one thing, editing code, and do that well. I have already bought one app that does the editing part fairly well, called “for i”. However as it cannot currently accept files from other applications it is not quite there yet.

As this now requires 2 distinct applications, each smaller in scope, I propose to alter the terms of the bounty to the following:
For each of the above described constituent applications a bounty of $500 is on offer. In total a sum of $1000 is being offered for solving the entire problem. However each part is already useful on its own and as such a partial pickup of the bounty should be possible

I sincerely hope, that someone will write these apps soon. Most of the parts already exists after all. There is an app called iVersion for the iPhone, which handles SVN, so that is almost there. All that remains on that fro is to port it to the iPads larger real estate and enable the sharing of files with other applications. The editor is, as mentioned above, almost there as well, all that remains there is to enable the receiving of files from other apps.

Oh and just to make this clear, I am not a patient person. So this bounty has an expiration date. If it is not claimed by September 1st 2010 00:00:00 UTC it expires not to come back again!

- Posted from my iPad