Showing posts with label safari. Show all posts
Showing posts with label safari. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

iPhone SDK delayed?

It's beginning to look as though the iPhone SDK may not ship this month since Apple has been silent about it. It was supposed to ship by the end of February. Of course this doesn't really have any impact on Run BASIC since it will not use the SDK, but it will produce apps that run in the iPhone's Safari web browser.

We haven't talked much about our plans for iPhone support in Run BASIC. We should have more to say in the next month or so.

Monday, February 04, 2008

iPhone development - activation experience

Since we have decided to create some iPhone development features for Run BASIC I bought an iPhone for this purpose. I thought it would be interesting to post my personal iPhone experience.

So, I went to the Apple store. I said that I wanted to buy an iPhone, so the youthful Apple employee grabbed me a small black box from behind the counter and handed it to me. "Big day," he said with a certain air of importance. I thought that was a little over the top. I mean, it's a phone. I wasn't having a baby. My daughter put it well, "Maybe if he was going to give you the $400 phone for free it would have been a big day." Ah well. I suppose Apple store employees can be forgiven for drinking the corporate koolaid. ;-)

I told him that I was buying the iPhone because I am working on easy development tools for it. He didn't quite get it right away that I wasn't working on iPhone apps for people to consume, but a really easy way for anyone to create their own iPhone apps that run in the Safari browser. I explained more carefully and got a gratifying 'Ahhhh' response from him. Gotta work on that marketing message.

So I took the phone home and unpacked it. There's no manual at all. There really should be for that price.

Alright, I understand that you activate the iPhone using iTunes. I am a Mac user (and a PC user) so I thought I would activate the phone from my Mac. That didn't work. I needed a newer version of iTunes. No big deal. I downloaded and installed the latest. Still no good. Why? Because then I discovered that I needed OS X v10.4.x or better. What then dawned on me made me a bit angry. I was going to need to activate the phone using iTunes on Windows. I think that qualifies as mistreatment by Apple of its customers.

Okay, so now I upgraded to the latest version of iTunes on my Vista box. I plugged the phone in and activated it. It went smoothly from there.

I'll post more about the iPhone and our work to support it using Run BASIC in the days to come.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Run BASIC and the iPhone

With Apple's iPhone getting ready to ship at the end of this month I'm very excited that we will have something soon that iPhone owners can use to customize their devices by running their own programs in the iPhone's built-in Safari web browser. Run BASIC (http://www.runbasic.com/) will be one easy way to extend the new device in the same way that many people used to use BASIC to create their own applications and games. This is really just the beginning since you can be sure that there will be so many similar kinds of telephones produced by the major cell phone makers.

I have a Treo 650 myself, and I can use it to access the Run BASIC site, but it is awkward because the web browser it includes is slow and the Treo has a tiny little screen. I am eager to see how this all works on the iPhone, and if it is compelling I may even buy one just so I can demonstrate Run BASIC wherever I am. ;-)