Re: IPhone Wax

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Phoenix Sol <phoenix@burninglabs.com> wrote:
> Well said. I have to agree with all of that, but just let me qualify
> that a good deal of my frustration is because I'd like to run code on
> my phone that only makes sense for me personally; private stuff that I
> would not want to offer commercially.

You can do that, developers can run their code on their phones.

> I wouldn't mind jumping in on the iPhone app market, if I didn't have
> to buy an Apple computer to do so. I prefer Linux and commodity
> hardware.

Developing on non-apple hardware though, that you can't do.


I might look at Wax. I tried using lua (and ruby) obj-c bindings
before I knew how to use the Cocoa toolkit. I found them unusable
without a good knowledge of obj-c and the cocoa class library, which
dampened my enthusiasm a lot.

Obj-c is reasonably concise within its domain, and so much of a iPhone
apps (I'm working on one now), are just about wiring bits of cocoa to
other bits, that its not clear to me there is enough non-cocoa logic
to make it worth using lua. Games have always seemed a corner case,
though a large profitable corner. They really need the performance of
low-level C-based languages (C, C++, obj-c), but also have very large
amounts of application logic (board game rules, making monsters walk
down corridors, whatever). If there isn't a sufficiently large amount
of that high-level code, its not clear that lua is a big win.

I don't use lua because I can save a few semicolons:

   [nstable add:something];

   nstable:add(something)

I use it where I can cut my code size by magnitudes, and modify it
quickly for ever-changing goals.

The app I'm building for the iPhone, for example, is mostly about
allowing cascading table views to navigate a database of rock climbing
routes. Very little app logic, lots of binding gui to sqlite calls.
The code would look much the same no matter the language, it is all
tied to the UIKit MVC APIs.

Still, I'll take a look some time. Recent adventures in working around
the lack of a map() method for arrays and dictionaries has been making
me roll my eyes in impatience with obj-c's...

Cheers,
Sam