Post date: Mar 18, 2016 10:38:53 PM
When we proposed the project to Dr. K.T. Tim Cheng, he informed us of a masters thesis using iOS completed by his student, David Gross, in 2014. The thesis, "Porting SPICE to iOS and Loading Netlists via QR Code," is available on David Gross's personal website and on academic databases. Although the projects have the same objective, the development of the app is completely divergent. The obvious difference is that one is for iPhone and the other for Android, so not only is the code incompatible and not portable, the approach must be different.
We were not able to find the app "QRCircuit" on the App Store, but Gross's thesis and website explain his app thoroughly.
If we were not able to cross-compile Ngspice, we would have to use JNI, because Ngspice is written in C, whereas an iOS developer can use Ngspice directly, since iOS in 2014 was implemented in Objective-C (now Swift).
For a comparison of the GUI, we can find screenshots of David Gross's QRCircuit here.
The main screen of QRCircuit presents us with six options, compared the two shown on DroidSpice: Get Circuit (to load a new circuit from a QR code) and Circuit Gallery (to find an previously loaded circuit). While the QRCircuit GUI seems to give slightly more control over the nodes and measurements, it may be overwhelming to someone who is a college freshman.