Rev on iPhone/iPod Touch ??

[Thomas McGrath III]

The iPhone SDK has an emulator that is used to test applications  
without having to download to an iPhone/iTouch.

As far as porting Rev stacks to work on the iPhone a whole new set of  
controls will need to be created. All apps use the underlying control  
structures of the iPhone. You really can't get around this. For  
instance if you want a row of buttons 'outside' of the SDKs button  
bar(menu bars) you have to embed a set of graphic buttons in a field  
object on the iPhone. You can not roll your own objects. So if a port  
did happen 'All' of the controls would be unique to the iPhone.

I have been building iPhone interfaces in Revolution for a year now  
and we have been using them as prototypes for a cocoa developer to  
rewrite in CocoaTouch. There are a lot of 'new' approaches to consider  
when developing for the iPhone. Aspect Ratio, Horizontal and/or  
Vertical, Scrolling interfaces, button resolution, image resolution,  
resizing, mouse over states, mouse still down, pinch, double tap.

All of these commands are called with rather simple commands from  
within the SDK but take a lot of extra time to emulate from within  
Revolution (this is a first that I've seen) or are completely  
impossible to emulate except in the most rudimentary way. So I go for  
a look and feel and adhere to the SDKs expected behavior. I actually  
have to write a "Variations" document to describe the differences for  
our Cocoa developers but because I have the Revolution Prototype I can  
skimp on the Engineering development documents and most of the SOW as  
well, which I usually include at the beginning of the Variations  
document. By the way this is a great way to make sure that offshore  
developers will give you exactly what you asked for which is a real  
problem for most offshore development projects.


Regards,

Tom McGrath


On Sep 18, 2008, at 3:56 PM, François Chaplais wrote:
>
>
> I don't think so, if I understand what SJ & co said at the WWDC  
> keynote & SDK announcement. The interface (that they call  
> CocoaTouch) is rather different from what you have with a mouse and  
> screen (this is also partially true for ajax). For instance, there  
> is no "mouseover" at this stage. By contrast, you have these touch  
> interface which is really different, and you have these extra  
> sensors. This interface is still, IMHO, rather underexploited.
>
> On the other hand, I agree that porting most of rev to such a device  
> seems reasonably feasible. But, to continue another thread (Cocoa),  
> a true porting would involve a loss of "cross platform  
> compatibility", which I translate by the appearance of some  
> diversity. Of course, it would be always possible to emulate most of  
> the classical interface, but I think that developing on such a  
> device (small screen, no overlapping windows, other sensors)  
> motivates the appearance of new interface solutions, at the very  
> least.
>
> François
> 	(very) amateur developer
>