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"In the more near future, I’d like to be able to develop iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. Why does this not exist yet??" I can't imagine this. One of my lea

by yawn 15y ago

"In the more near future, I’d like to be able to develop iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. Why does this not exist yet??" I can't imagine this. One of my least favorite things to do is type on touchscreen phones, and that's not even code. How would this work?

afterburner 15y ago
You can't even edit any playlist you want on the iPhone. Developing on it sounds like it's in a different universe, even though it doesn't need to be.
iamwil 15y ago
attach an external keyboard and mouse. Or in the near future, virtual keyboards and mice that come with the device. There are keyboards that are virtual, that shine a laser. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/ It's not too far of a stretch to imagine mice with something similar. In addition, projectors are getting smaller and smaller, and it's not infeasible for them to be on future smartphones. That way, you won't need to squint at the screen, as long as you have a wall nearby.
- klochner 15y ago
  . . . but then you aren't really developing on an iphone, in any meaningful sense anyway - all the "iphoneness" has been replaced, so it's effectively no different than any apple device with a cpu - ipad, mac mini, macbook etc. I think she meant she wanted a touch-screen ui that lets you drag and drop elements into a new app. Doubtful you would get anything complex or terribly unique out of that kind of interface. Certainly no angry birds :)
  - dlsspy 15y ago
    That's pretty much how all development works in OS X proper. Just today, I needed a simple interactive calculator to think through a problem. It took me about as long to write an app as it would've taken me to make a spreadsheet, but I got to have it be interactive and do what I needed: http://skitch.com/dlsspy/rh8rp/throwaway-app http://skitch.com/dlsspy/rh8rp/throwaway-app
    - klochner 15y ago
      cool, is that in cocoa? for some reason I draw a distinction between "development" and writing little utilities for personal use, maybe because my little utilities aren't as pretty.
      - dlsspy 15y ago
        Yes. Tiny bit of objective C and enough time in IB to draw my inputs. Much of the mobile development I did was for little things like that. I wrote a utility for palmos to clean up my SMSes in batch because the UI on my phone and the palm both sucked. The most complex I wrote was a call log app that would helped me with a particular problem I was having. Most things were just using it as a fancy calculator or playing around with algorithms or something. I'm not very good at consumer devices, but I think everyone should at least have access to such toys (iLuaBox is a good start).
dlsspy 15y ago
I used to write HP48 apps in Saturn assembler or RPL. I used to write newton apps on my newton in Newtonscript. I used to write palm apps on my palm in scheme mostly, but I could also write them in C, pascal, and numerous other languages. I write mac apps on my mac in just about everything. Things I can't do on my mobile devices are severely limiting. Not being able to just throw something together to solve a problem, do a little visualization, etc... I've got a lua runtime on my iPad that helps out, but it's insufficient since it's quite second class.

by yawn 15y ago

afterburner 15y ago

You can't even edit any playlist you want on the iPhone. Developing on it sounds like it's in a different universe, even though it doesn't need to be.

iamwil 15y ago

attach an external keyboard and mouse. Or in the near future, virtual keyboards and mice that come with the device. There are keyboards that are virtual, that shine a laser. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/ It's not too far of a stretch to imagine mice with something similar. In addition, projectors are getting smaller and smaller, and it's not infeasible for them to be on future smartphones. That way, you won't need to squint at the screen, as long as you have a wall nearby.

klochner 15y ago
. . . but then you aren't really developing on an iphone, in any meaningful sense anyway - all the "iphoneness" has been replaced, so it's effectively no different than any apple device with a cpu - ipad, mac mini, macbook etc. I think she meant she wanted a touch-screen ui that lets you drag and drop elements into a new app. Doubtful you would get anything complex or terribly unique out of that kind of interface. Certainly no angry birds :)
- dlsspy 15y ago
  That's pretty much how all development works in OS X proper. Just today, I needed a simple interactive calculator to think through a problem. It took me about as long to write an app as it would've taken me to make a spreadsheet, but I got to have it be interactive and do what I needed: http://skitch.com/dlsspy/rh8rp/throwaway-app http://skitch.com/dlsspy/rh8rp/throwaway-app
  - klochner 15y ago
    cool, is that in cocoa? for some reason I draw a distinction between "development" and writing little utilities for personal use, maybe because my little utilities aren't as pretty.
    - dlsspy 15y ago
      Yes. Tiny bit of objective C and enough time in IB to draw my inputs. Much of the mobile development I did was for little things like that. I wrote a utility for palmos to clean up my SMSes in batch because the UI on my phone and the palm both sucked. The most complex I wrote was a call log app that would helped me with a particular problem I was having. Most things were just using it as a fancy calculator or playing around with algorithms or something. I'm not very good at consumer devices, but I think everyone should at least have access to such toys (iLuaBox is a good start).

dlsspy 15y ago

I used to write HP48 apps in Saturn assembler or RPL. I used to write newton apps on my newton in Newtonscript. I used to write palm apps on my palm in scheme mostly, but I could also write them in C, pascal, and numerous other languages. I write mac apps on my mac in just about everything. Things I can't do on my mobile devices are severely limiting. Not being able to just throw something together to solve a problem, do a little visualization, etc... I've got a lua runtime on my iPad that helps out, but it's insufficient since it's quite second class.