[GSOC weekly update] iOS remote control

[Andrzej J. R. Hunt]

On 11/06/13 16:11, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> Actually I wonder why the thumbnails need to be Base64 encoded at all;
> surely the communication is not going through any 7-bit
> short-lines-of-text -enforcing channel;) Would it not be possible to
> just pass the PNG (IIRC) bytes as such as a binary blob? Prefixed by
> information about its length, presumably. And then instead of
> writing/reading base64 encoded lines, just write/read the specified
> number of bytes. Would of course be incompatible with existing
> (Android) remote control implementations, so some way to negotiate
> versions of the protocol at start would be needed.
>
I wanted the protocol to be as simple as possible -- hence a purely text
based protocol -- which turns out to be simple to work with in most
languages -- but necessitated extra encoding for images. For iOS and
Android it may in fact be more efficient to change to binary, but that
probably won't work well for the Firefox Os version of the app I'm
working on given Javascript is pretty poor at working with binary data.

(A protocol version negotiation would be very useful for other things
though anyway: e.g. currently the server pushes all the slide previews
at the start of the presentation, ideally the remote would request them
as necessary instead -- and there may be other things needing changing
in the future / other features for which this would be useful.)

Cheers,

    Andrzej