Flame¶
298 words on Software
If you know a bit of Cocoa, the iPhone platform is an interesting toy to play with. And you’ll quickly find out that it’s relatively simple to come up with an application displaying a list that swooshes across the screen every now and then. Tom started porting his Mac Bonjour browser called Flame to the iPhone almost a year ago. Over time I joined in and contributed a feature or two and tried to clean up the look to suit my taste. The resulting code is available for your amusement. And thanks to Tom going through Apple’s draconian sign-up and approval process, the binary is as well.
The application does the simple job of displaying all the Bonjour Services on your network. Either grouped by Server or by Service Type. You can look at the Services’ details and open those for which you have matching applications installed. Interestingly Mobile Safari can handle FTP (for small values of ‘handle’) and unfortunately the VNC clients I looked at don’t seem to register protocol handlers. If the iPhone software ‘ecosystem’ didn’t suck so badly, one could even send the authors of those applications an e-mail and let them know.
‘Naturally’ the application works on Wi-Fi only. It does its job in English, German and French (many thanks to Ronald, once again) and we hope it does it reasonably well. Let us know if it doesn’t; There’s a feedback link in the about box.
While it’s nice to see some software you contributed to out in the public, I have to say that the whole App-store crap makes it feel dirty. It’s essentially supporting the bad guys.
Be sure to also look at the Bookmark Advertiser Mac application which advertises your open Safari pages via Bonjour and which Flame supports.
