Squeak on iOS at last?

When I heard that Apple was competing with Surface Pro I went looking for the only feature of the Surface Pro that I wanted in Apple's new tablet: side loading.

It looks like Apple has dropped the $99 a year for not even necessarily selling anything on the App Store requirement. It's not exactly side-loading, because end users would still have to build the VM from C sources in Xcode before installing it, but it's something.

The upshot is, since we can't ship via app-store, we can do a source distribution and get around the stupid App Store rules that hate us so. Thus, we don't have to rely on weird flaky crap like jailbreaks or have a guy paying for a dev account out of the goodness of his heart to distribute test keys for the system to those brave enough to run it without a proper touch interface.

I may buy another iPad yet.

Guessing most people familiar with the sitch are probably up to date, but for anyone who missed this detail, Casey to the rescue.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/06/10/xcode-7-allows-anyone-to-download-build-and-sideload-ios-apps-for-free/

On Sep 22, 2015, at 07:39, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 21.09.2015, at 01:40, Javier Diaz-Reinoso <[hidden email]> wrote:

I am also interested in this, so I wasted a few days and finally have a (original) Squeak 4.1 image working in mi old iPad 2:

<Photo on 9-20-15 at 18.31.jpeg>

Nice!

the clock works, but that is all, I can’t enter anything, I know I need modifications in the image, but before I spend more days in this, can any people who knows send me advice and perhaps a change set with the modifications?

You can dig around on John McIntosh’s site but I don’t think there’s a comprehensible set of changes yet.

I find the file miPhone-Events-EstebanLorenzano.25.mcz who contains your code and code from John McIntosh and Esteban Lorenzano and others, that file don’t load in Squeak, I suppose is for Pharo, but with selective copy-paste I have now a working UI.

What I did years ago was adding image-side support for multi-touch, plus an on-screen alt key [*]. That’s not strictly necessary though, the VM could (and IMHO should) generate mouse events itself. Still, you need a way to bring up the keyboard (which I ‘solved’ back then by hacking the VM to show the keyboard when rotating to portrait orientation).

The proper way to do this (IMHO) would be by implementing an IMM plugin for iOS just like we have for X11 etc. Morphic calls a plugin function whenever a text input field gets focused, which could be used to trigger the keyboard. But AFAIK nobody has gone that route yet, instead relying on the ObjectiveCBridge plugin to call OS functions directly.

Your best bet if you want to avoid doing it yourself would be contacting the makers of Pyonkee, the most complex Squeak app in the Apple App Store yet. There is also DrGeo, for which Esteban did the VM work. And since all this is still pretty experimental, continuing this discussion on the VM dev list would be a good idea :)

- Bert -

[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYrp31fH-Jk

I find in a Pharo repository the folder IOSPlugin who is used in DrGeo, is very small but works, in the .mcz is some code to call the plugin from TextMorph>>wantsKeyboardFocus who also is not in Squeak, but inserting the line in TextMorphForEditView>>keyboardFocusChange: is now possible to simple click in a Workspace or Browser and the keyboard appears.

Apart from a few fixes I am not really changing the VM, is only in the image. The most desirable change in the VM I think is changing to Cog more speed is always best.