Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/pieceable-viewer/

by mp3jeep01 • 15 years ago

149 24 15 years ago

kenjackson• 15 years ago

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.

Zev• 15 years ago

Manually installing an app in the simulator is the easy part. Slightly harder is running multiple copies of the simulator.

timdorr• 15 years ago

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.

dmpatierno• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

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.

cpr• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

ericflo• 15 years ago

Very, very cool.

wallflower• 15 years ago

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...

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.

rodh257• 15 years ago

On my Galaxy S, Samsung has baked in Home+Back Button as a way of taking screenshots... though needless to say this combination is prone to error. It also doesn't seem to work on certain views.

newhouseb• 15 years ago

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.

jevinskie• 15 years ago

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

josh33• 15 years ago

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).

MichaelApproved2• 15 years ago

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.

fpotter3• 15 years ago

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 :-)

MichaelApproved2• 15 years ago

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

tajddin• 15 years ago

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

fpotter3• 15 years ago

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.

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

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

tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

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

jasonkester• 15 years ago

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.

pancakeman• 15 years ago

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

Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer

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