iPhoney
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008A nice thing about the iPhone SDK is that it includes an emulator, so even without an iPhone I can still mess around with one (up to a point— no actual GSM/3G/GPS functionality is available for obvious reasons). As well as a slick rendering of the actual iphone itself (not just the screen) the emulator allows you to view horizontally as well (causing Safari and the photo viewer do their animated screen rotations just like on the real thing).
Unfortunately by the time I get around to trying any iPhone development the iTunes App store will no doubt be utterly flooded with garbage (if it isn’t already) and all the good territory will be taken by the people who have a clue.
Some people have asked about the possibility of Drivey on the iPhone, but to be honest I don’t think it belongs there— at least not in its "dreamy" mode. Drivey is not intended as a quick distraction, rather as an immersive experience. Also it would totally eat battery life on a mobile device. It would look pretty cool though. Here’s a mockup just to annoy the people who look at the pictures before they read the text.
Speaking of Drivey, I got some nice feedback recently (I have actually received hundreds over the years; I keep meaning to collect them together and make a best of list to inspire me to pick it up again). I hope A.T. won’t mind me posting this here:
I first tried Drivey about three years ago. Since then, I’ve been through a couple of new PCs (losing the installation along the way), but, feeling all nostalgic, I came looking for Drivey tonight and it’s still one of the finest graphical demos/screensavers/
idontknowwhatthehellitisbutilo veit-its I’ve ever seen. Don’t worry about collision detection, or game features: it’s perfect the way it is.
Feedback like this reminds me of what I love about programming— although of course I’m sure many people would disagree that Drivey needs no further work :)
August 6th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Ah, the legendary Drivey! Note to self, check Wikipedia to see if there is an article about it yet… ;-)
August 6th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
yes, the new itunes app store is totally full of crap. i think the best apps were actually released via nullriver’s apptapp installer. Shame, with the offical restrictions on what apps can and can’t do, the cool things remain in the realm of pre v2.0 software only.
no desire to upgrade my 1.02 firmware iphone. yay for early adopters for once.
PS: people here in australia complain that iphone 3G keeps reverting to 2.5G edge about 50-80% of the time.
oh well,
August 7th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I second (third) the app store viewpoint… seemed like a great idea, and I was quite happy to see apple taking control over the distribution, because I thought it would either produce quality, or at least organization and filtering. Nope and nope. Weird too, that some of the best designed jailbroken apps haven’t yet surfaced (such as the perfectly designed Converter app). I still reckon your stuff would be good enough to find its way above the garbage though.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:06 am
How hard do you think it would be to at least port it to OS X?
August 8th, 2008 at 1:34 am
it would probably be easy on a technical level but would take quite a lot of time, since it is built on my rather monolithic set of graphics and scripting libraries I’ve developed over the years.
I have XCode installed though, so, as soon as I find some free time…
August 8th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I imagine, given the evolution of OS X with Snow Leopard, the thing you write for iPhone would have much in common with the thing you write for OS X.
August 11th, 2008 at 7:17 am
of course he should care about collision detection. what the fuck were you thinking A.T.?
mark, can we expect a new drivey release in 2008?
August 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I’m going to go out on a limb and say yes, there will be a new drivey [demo] sometime this year, but it will probably still be some way from being anything “playable”. Main difference is that it won’t be on a closed loop of road and may therefore offer more variety in scenery (and there may be intersections).