

Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer - mp3jeep01
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/pieceable-viewer/

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jevinskie
Meanwhile development of a true iDevice emulator is underway. Unlike XCode's
iDevice simulator (it compiles the dev app for the host architecture
[x86/x86-64]), this emulator is based off of ARM QEMU with lots of hard work
going into emulating the iPhone's hardware. It directly emulates stock
iOSes/apps.

Project page: <http://www.iemu.org>

Github: <https://github.com/cmwdotme/QEMU-s5l89xx-port>

Screenshots: <http://www.cmw.me/lcdworking.png>
<http://www.cmw.me/ichargetoo.png> <http://www.iemu.org/oibiemu.png>

Author's Twitter: <http://twitter.com/cmwdotme>

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jasonkester
Aw, TechCrunch. Why do you do it?

These guys put together a cool little simulator and you use it _embed a single
app into your article_ , thus forcing all 100k visitors to your site to DOS
the thing??? Why not link to the site and let people hit it on their own, thus
spreading the load out to a few different apps and giving the server a chance
to handle your traffic?

I feel for these guys because TechCrunch did the same thing to us when they
reviewed Twiddla. They linked a single meeting room, thus essentially sending
10000 people into one conference call. "wow, this is crowded." "who changed
the page?" "why did my drawing get erased?"

It was a full hour of chaos before we noticed what they'd done and pushed a
new build to specifically redirect traffic from that meeting to the homepage.
Not that TC traffic is particularly useful in terms of long term customers,
but guys, at least try to think about what will actually happen if you deep
link stuff like that.

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wallflower
Amazon is doing some interesting work to drive an EC2 hosted Android simulator
with a Flash front-end, letting to you test drive apps in the browser.

[http://gigaom.com/mobile/amazons-testdrive-is-the-real-
stren...](http://gigaom.com/mobile/amazons-testdrive-is-the-real-strength-of-
appstore/)

That being said, it is ridiculous that there is no built in way to take
screens of an app on an Android phone (like the power + home iOS combo). Since
Android has the concept of a secure canvas (e.g.sensitive content), this
should be stock.

Lack of easy screenshots makes it harder for normal users to blog about and
help review and promote an Android app.

~~~
newhouseb
It's pretty mind blowing - when I was developing Yelp Monocle on Android the
best way to get a screenshot was to _take_a_picture_of_the_damn_phone_ because
the SDK screenshot utility read out pixels very slowly in a raster pattern and
due to the jitter from the sensors this resulted in a screenshot that appeared
as if you were fast forwarding through a video.

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dmpatierno
This is very cool. I'd love to read more about how it works. I think they're
running a dedicated iOS simulator for each app and streaming the user
input/video output via Flash. Even their $60/mo plan has a limit of 10
simultaneous viewers, so I imagine it's pretty taxing on their hardware.

They must be capturing the output at some deeper layer though since OpenGL
doesn't render (but it does run).

~~~
guelo
Maybe, except that these demo apps, Yelp, Hipmunk, etc. are probably seeing
100s of simultaneous viewings right now. I guess they could have racks and
racks of mac minis.

~~~
tlrobinson
I'm guessing they increased the limit for the demos for free. I wouldn't be
surprised if a single machine could run a dozen or two apps simultaneously, if
they were able to trick the simulator into running multiple instances.

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cpr
Since you send them a copy of your iPhone simulator code, they must be running
this on some kind of Mac OS X system, and giving you VNC-style access to the
app.

Kinda dodgy.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
iPhone Simulator binary, not source code per <http://www.pieceable.com/viewer>

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josh33
I have needed this product for months now to demo my company's app for
prospective buyers. This will allow our technical sales force (who are on
PC's) to share this via GoToMeeting with prospects (we're a B2B in a very
relationship-driven industry).

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tajddin
Interesting, but I do find it somewhat ironic that it would be Flash player
relaying iPhone apps to the browser.

~~~
fpotter
Yes, we do, too :-)

The first version was actually all standard web stuff, but the performance was
just a little bit below what we wanted. Flash works for now.

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kenjackson
How does this work? Is it an iPhone emulator? If so, that seems non-trivial to
get working considering how little is publicly available about it.

~~~
timdorr
You can see artifacting in the viewer and a ton of bandwidth usage, so it
appears to be VNC to a system actually running the iPhone simulator.

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MichaelApproved
The idea is great but unfortunately the technology behind it is limiting.
Since their highest pricing plan only allows for 10 simultaneous viewers it's
not realistic option to embed it in a popular blog as a demo.

~~~
fpotter
Hey - I'm one of the Pieceable founders.

The pricing plans we've put up so far are definitely intended for agencies /
dev shops that want to share apps-in-progress with clients. We know there's a
lot more we could do with this, though - we're just waiting for everyone to
tell us what they want before we add new pricing :-)

~~~
MichaelApproved
Can you share what the max connections the Yelp app was pulling from the
article? And how many total connections it had?

~~~
fpotter
Not sure what the max number of concurrent connections was, but the Yelp app
has been opened just over 10k times so far.

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tlrobinson
Really cool stuff. I'm also looking forward to seeing Pieceable itself launch,
the app editor is built with Cappuccino.

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iamelgringo
Congrats on the coverage, guys! We missed you at dinner. :)

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pancakeman
Wow, cool idea. Anyone able to do this yet? Does it work?

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ericflo
Very, very cool.

