I'm pleased to say that I'm one of the 1.5% of the iPhone developer  
population that has been
accepted to officially build applications for distribution via Apple's  
iPhone Application Store.

Because of this I have embarked on a 93 work day journey to build a  
new fully documented Objective C based source
tree to host the Squeak VM on the iPhone and as a 64bit VM on OS-X.

Likely this *might* take longer and it *hinges* on the ability to get  
funding from various sources for the effort.
So funding offers are welcome.

Not only is there VM support work involved, one needs to adapt to the  
multi-touch paradigm and become
much less keyboard input orientated, plus use platform widgets for  
selection input.

Helpfully the folks from Impara have agreed to take on some of that  
effort, and I'm sure they could use some funding to speed that process.

People who are interested in offering Squeak based applications either  
via the free store, or
selling via the paid store are welcome to contact me, likely I will  
provide for a fee a support agreement
for the base iPhone VM and arrange sell-thru opportunities for paid  
applications.

Sadly because of Apple's legal obligations not all application types  
and general Squeak functionality
is acceptable to Apple for sale thru the store, or even offered via  
the free store. The list of "tho shall not do" is quite lengthy.
Still I think there is an opportunity to deliver interesting Squeak  
based applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

After 15 days of work just to cross check feasibility I can offer up  
the attached image of  Squeak  3.4 running on an iPod Touch, I could
have picked a 3.10 image, but the 3.4 screen below is more visually  
exciting.

At  the current 20 days of work I have screen orientation working  
(mostly), drawing, basic touching to mouse event translation,
suffered thru 3 beta versions of the SDK, and posted a few interesting  
bug reports with Apple, and yes likely behind in my estimated timetable.

Still as the other developers here at WWDC 08 (yes I am in SF at the  
moment) have noted getting something up
and running is fast, it's just the other painful 10%...

For the curious the VM that I have built & somewhat tuned does about  
21,548,821 bytecode/sec; and 564,465 sends/sec

Digging in the history books this is equivalent to a 233Mhz 603e  
powerbook. If you are excited about running
your Squeak app on the iPhone, think hard about the meaning of these  
numbers... Also consider that 64MB of memory
use is pushing the Apple's imposed safety limits right to the max.

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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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