[squeak-dev] Squeak and the iPhone

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Wed Jun 11 16:05:46 UTC 2008


2008/6/11 John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>:
> 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.

Have the licensing terms changed and programs that can run other
programs now allowed on the iPhone?

Cheers
Philippe



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