Saturday, January 12, 2008

iPhone BASIC?

Now that we've released Run BASIC, we would like to collect some feedback about the idea of adding some capability for the iPhone (and other mobile phones). There is a Javascript library and some CSS called iUi http://code.google.com/p/iui/ which provides the metaphor and visual look for iPhone (and iPod Touch) apps. This would make for very easy iPhone development, and it could be a great marketing button for Run BASIC.

Apple plans to announce some sort of SDK next month if I'm not mistaken, but a lot of iPhone software development will definitely still be web apps.

We could:

  • Work on this now
  • Work on this later
  • Encourage the RB community to integrate iUi by writing BASIC code

Perhaps the last option is the most sensible for now. Feedback is welcome.

2 comments:

Bill Williams said...

Hey Carl,

I wish I had an iPhone so I could help y'all out with this. Now if I could just figure out a good excuse...

The main thing about iUI (or any Javascript library, really) is getting data from Javascript to Run BASIC. I haven't been able to figure out a reliable way to do that from within a module. It'd be great if there was an in-built function that returned a Javascript value. It'd seem easy enough to implement... the content$() method for textboxes has to get values from the page to the server somehow, after all.

Of course, being able to have modules automatically render themselves would help. If an RB module were implemented for iUI, it'd be very hard to use, since you'd have to RENDER it every time a method was called. It'd be much cleaner to have the module render itself from inside the method.

华君 said...

I have a try, but iPhone do not allow and language interpreter iPhone. Take a look at.

http://smartcalc.coollittlethings.com/