Enabling & using WebGL on iOS 4.2+

http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/03/enabling-and-using-webgl-on-ios/

by atnan • 15 years ago

98 22 15 years ago

wow, great this opens up endless possibilities :)

Has Apple stated any plans to continue developing WebGL for iOS? It seems like the kind of thing that could compete with their app business.

atnan4• 15 years ago

The argument that WebGL "competes" with OpenGL-ES, to the detriment of Apple, makes very little sense to me.

You only need to look at the number of engineers Apple has contributing to WebKit & new web standards (CSS transitions & animations, WebGL etc.).

lloeki• 15 years ago

On the other hand it's a serious feature of their iAd business.

irrationalfab2• 15 years ago

As an iOS developer I feel that native apps will have a technical edge for a while. WebApps are built with tools that weren't designed for creating GUIs, you can do it but it is much less efficient and effective. This is especially true for complex applications like games (the ones that would benefit the most from webGL).

cschep• 15 years ago

Would love to see more about how to read that disassembly and piece all that together.. I'm impressed!

alastairpat2• 15 years ago

Perhaps more interesting than WebGL is actually him documenting the process that he took in figuring out how it worked.

I really wish I had a better understanding of disassembly.

dolbz• 15 years ago

Yeah I would love to see more of this type of analysis. It's really revealing and interesting.

irrationalfab2• 15 years ago

I feel the same. I would love to understand a bit more of what is going on under the hood. I did a quick research but I could not find something quick enough to work as a primer.

The best resources I found are: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2239/_i... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25636/what-is-the-best-wa...

alastairpat2• 15 years ago

Those are both really interesting, thanks.

I'm really embarrassed to admit I have very little understanding of what happens below Objective-C. Looks like it's time for me to start reading…

atnan4• 15 years ago

TN2239 is invaluable for debugging and digging through things you shouldn't necessarily be poking around in :-)

ryanpetrich• 15 years ago

Great work atnan.

Cat's out of the bag, may as well make public my experiment to enable WebGL on all webviews: https://github.com/rpetrich/WebGLEnabler

atnan4• 15 years ago

Hi Ryan,

That's pretty neat! An unfortunate side effect is that running Mobile Safari unsigned negates the 'dynamic-codesigning' entitlement, which means that Nitro is disabled.

That said, a WebGL-enabled UIWebView running in your own app will also not be Nitro-enabled. I've run the PhiloGL spinning world demo on my device and it's running at 40fps, so simpler demos may be possible without a Nitro to boost things a bit.

Cheers,

Nathan

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Given that WebKit has support for WebM, I wonder how much work it would take to do the same kind of hack to enable WebM support for the video tag? (More, I suspect, since iOS probably doesn't ship the required libraries.)

atnan4• 15 years ago

For that you'd probably want to dig into WebKit.framework — the private WebPluginController & WebPluginDatabase classes look rather interesting.

geuis• 15 years ago

Just as a reminder, if you link against any private api or framework in and app and submit it to the App Store, your app will be denied. You may get lucky and have your app slip through, but expect that at any time it will get removed from the store.

alex_unstable2• 15 years ago

hey atnan, great article, very insightful, congrats. Seems like Apple has put a lot of effort on improving UIWebviews, there is more than just Nitro, apparently.

I strongly believe the whole HTML5 standard is supported on iOS5 but it has to be enabled. Did anyone notice the SQLite database that's created everytime you use a UIWebview? I've been trying to enable offline navigation and got kinda stuck but this gives me a couple of good new ideas.

Cheers, Alex

robterrell• 15 years ago

Safari and MobileSafari support HTML5 local storage:

http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#codinghowtos/Desk...

There's nothing you have to do to enable it. Except use it.

alex_unstable2• 15 years ago

I does work on MobileSafari but not on UIWebviews. There's a key called "WebKitOfflineWebApplicationCacheEnabled" that's automatically set to YES but it doesn't seem make any difference. I'm trying to find out why, but for that I need to go down to the dungeons of Apple's private frameworks and there is where I'm struggling at the moment.

funkaster• 15 years ago

I just tried running the code in an iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3.5 - got a invalid selector (_setWebGLEnabled). Worked just fine with an iTouch 4gen with iOS 5 though... Has anyone tested this on a device with iOS 4.2+?

brettgo1• 15 years ago

Somebody at Apple should hire this Aussie!

marcinignac• 15 years ago

I put some video going through few WebGL enabled websites and it's looks very promising http://vimeo.com/31644717 The JavaSript performance itself for example in mesh building is really terrible. Trying to benchmark it against Nitro in normal Mobile Safari would be a good thing to do.

Enabling & using WebGL on iOS 4.2+

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