Rev on iPhone/iPod Touch ??

François Chaplais francois.chaplais at mines-paristech.fr
Tue Sep 23 16:17:37 EDT 2008


Le 23 sept. 08 à 19:24, Thomas McGrath III a écrit :

> François,
>
> Stacks will not run natively on the iPhone with any version of the  
> Rev player. This is because most of the controls on the iPhone are  
> not compatible with the controls in Revolution. This means that  
> buttons, fields, images, players, etc. will not port over. The code  
> might since that is just text until compiled. The player/IDE would  
> need to provide a set of controls 'specific' to the iPhone and  
> stacks would have to adhere to these. So any old stacks would need  
> to be rewritten.
>
>

I understand. This does require some development, it was obvious in  
my mind, I should have mentioned it. In a another post, I mentioned  
the interface differences between classic GUI computers and iPhones/ 
iPod touch. Many features can be ported however: buttons do exists,  
slider controls exist, field scrolling is done by finger sliding,  
menus are replaced by a scrolling wheel, media players could  
certainly be created considering the wide amount of media format  
supported. I'm pretty sure you can put an image on a control.
I completely agree that stacks should be rewritten and the IDE would  
have the an iPhone mode. The main issue, in my opinion, is that  
screen estate is so small that multiple windows are never used.

But my point is elsewhere and it is the same point that gave  
Hypercard its appeal: the ability to bypass the classic development  
scheme. For the Mac, this meant you didn't have to learn Inside  
Macintosh and use MPW. This is the same with "modern" platforms.
On the iPhone,/iPod touch, if you want to develop an application, you  
have to go through XCode PLUS the convoluted Apple distribution  
scheme. If the iPhone stack player + Dedicated IDE of a computer was  
implemented, this would mean an acceleration in the development cycle  
of iPhone "applications". Consider for instance that, because of the  
NDA, iPhone developers cannot even discuss together on a list such as  
this one!

I said elsewhere that I am not a professional programer, but, as far  
as transcript is concerned, it should be possible to port it to the  
iPhone facelessly. Now the only issue that I see is whether the  
iPhone SDK allows control (or other interface elements) to be created  
at runtime instead of having if defined, say, by the interface  
builder. If some people here have toyed (or more) with the iPhone  
SDK, this would be an interesting element to consider.

Very best regards,
	François




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