Apple changed the Developers Agreement for OS 4.0 yesterday. There’s been a mild uproar from the usual suspects — folks whom it would never affect anyway since they never plan on doing Apple/iPhone development – for whatever reason.

The basic idea appears to be that – if you (developer/software co.) want to sell your iPhone app thru the iTunes AppStore, you have to use Apple approved software dev. tools. Of which there appears to be only 1. XCode 3.2.3+. And Apple approved API’s and libraries. Which means – C, C++, and Objective-C (which is C with a twist of Smalltalk syntax). And none of the cross-platform tools ->

Some pundits claim it’s a shot across the bows of Adobe, since it basically kills off their CS5/Flash to iPhone app generator (that they are supposed to announce/release next week. Ouch.). (Another skirmish in the Apple/Adobe Flash-wars?)

Another possible victim is Novell’s MonoTouch (It lets you use Mono (Novell’s .NET clone) and C# to develop iPhone Apps.)

And then there’s iSqueak – a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) for the iPhone. Not sure where it fits in – it might survive since it IS built with XCode. (Not that you can get it from the App Store since it breaks at least one App Store rule. But the the person who ported it to the iPhone has used it to generate several iPhone Apps that are in the store.)

I believe there are a could other similar cross-platform development tools that violate the new rules but I don’t remember them.

Me? I couldn’t afford the Adobe tools anyway. Monotouch was $1000/year the last time I checked. iSqueak? I’ve been tinkering with Squeak for years but never written anything “real” (I just like the environment). So none of those really affect me.

Apple only charges $99/year for their iPhone Dev. program (aka access to the App Store) but XCode is free (It just requires a Mac to run it on. And a test device would be good when using beta versions of the iPhone SDK.)

So the rule change doesn’t affect me personally. I couldn’t afford the possible commercial non-Apple cross-dev tools anyway. And I’m not one of those people who thinks Apple is evil so it doesn’t really upset me.

But I really need to find the time to do something .

And then things went meta and I started thinking about HOW I got to thinking about that in the first place. So bear with me for a moment. (I’m not going to explain all of the tech things I mention along the way. Sorry. There’s a google for that.)

It started with a discussion on InsaneJournal about fan fiction.

In December I hit 500,000+ words of fic on TtH. I’ve had fic on TtH since before 2004 (there was a brief moment in late 2003 when the site crashed and burned and everyone had to re-upload their fics. Not that I had much there at the time. And ‘He Who Now Wrangles TtH’ does daily backups so that isn’t likely to ever happen again.)

I started my blog back in 2002. I started putting my (first) fics up on it some time in 2003.

I set up my first web server back in 1994 (Using the CERN http server on a VAX/VMS system where I was working post-college/post-student teaching. (Got a job in Admin. Computing at my Alma mater. There were no teaching jobs in NH that spring and I REALLY needed a job.). By 1995 I had my own website (simplistic) running on my desktop (Windows NT 3.5 – back when it was a “pure-er” OS that still retained it’s Dave Cutler/VMS roots)

Bought the first Apple Newton Messagepad with my first real paycheck/job after graduating.

While I was student teaching (High School English – Yeah!) I set up a writing lab – This being in NH, we used a bunch of surplus DECMate III’s (Dedicated word processor from DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) built on top of a single chip PDP-8. I bought a couple as surplus myself – I’ve got a copy (borrowed actually. Someday I’ll return it) of Zork that runs on the included C/P-M cards the things had. (They also had MS-DOS co-processor cards.).

I worked for the Admin Computing department (student worker) in college. Networking. Started out installing serial lines. By the time I finished college we were doing campus-wide ethernet over a fiber backbone and I was managing the Appletalk network.

I used my own computer for college (English/Liberal Arts major. I spent most of my time writing papers, essays, etc. Didn’t take a comp. sci. class until after I’d graduated.). Started out using an 8bit (6502 CPU) Atari 600XL+32K memory card and a wordprocessor called ‘Paperclip’. When that died – lightning – the insurance company paid me enough to buy the next generation Atari computer. That + Wordperfect got me through the rest of college. (I still have one in storage (in another state)) (I’ve been buying/using Mac laptops since then.)

The internet didn’t really exist when I was in college. When I was a freshman (1985) I was at a school that let regular students have time on a VAX (10 CPU hours a semester. I used that in the first month just exploring. Paid for my time after that. $1/CPU hr.)). Did e-mail and ‘Relay’ (a precursor to irc that ran on BITNET – which was a global network BEFORE the internet. Still didn’t really have the internet when I graduated from college (that would be another year or so before the smalelr schools had it.) but we did have Usenet (I can find traces of myself on Usenet all the way back to ’89. Or I used to be able to.)

During the multi-year gap between high school and college (the less said about that the better),  and between transferring between differnet schools, I did the local BBS thing using 300 and 1200 baud modems on assorted Atari computers (including the one mentioned above.). Couldn’t afford Compuserve. But I did have a subscription to Byte .

I learned how to program ( BASIC) from a book in high school. My junior year, the school found the money to put in a computer lab. Half a dozen TRS-80 Model III’s They might even have had floppies. By the time I was a senior we also had a Tandy Color Computer (I). Ah… the good old days. A BASIC interpreter. (The Special Ed Office (as it was called in the early 80′s (we were less politically correct back then – it was the cusp of the Reagan era.)) had a couple Apple II+’s for the special needs kids (only) (I only knew that because I helped unbox them – I was taking a photography class (still have the pictures. And the 35mm camera (somewhere. I still have the Canon A-1 I bought after high school. Weighs a “ton” compared to my Canon Rebel XT.) and the A/V teacher decided to use a class period to set them up.)

(My older brother actually got to take a programming class at the semi-local college (Fortran. Using punch cards.) but they weren’t doing that when it would have been my turn.) I wanted to learn Pascal – the math teacher doing the BASIC class had it for the TRS-80 but she didn’t know it so I couldn’t learn it before her (paraphrased.)

And that’s pretty much it. A nostalgia trail. Fanfic to Computing in the bear-skin and stone axe age.

Looks like it’s been ported to the iPhone as iSqueak

(There’s even a couple apps written in Squeak available on the iTunes app store. I bought 1 (a wiki server app) more as a way to show support for them than anything else. Not sure what I’m really going to do with a wiki on my iPhone.)

- unfortunately, it isn’t going to appear on the app store any time soon since it really IS a Smalltalk environment and you can write your own programs and run other people’s programs (Just look at what happened to that C64 emulator when Apple found out the Basic interpreter was enable-able (Is that even a word?))

But if you know an Apple iPhone developer…  and you want to do some Smalltalk on your iPhone/iPod touch… and you ask nicely… maybe they’ll build a copy of it for you.

Issues –

• Hopefully, the Squeak image used by iSqueak can be updated outside of the iPhone VM — because it doesn’t want to get past the second change set (10420) on my iPhone. (And, given the way the iPhone OS does multi-tasking… you can’t have that going on in the background.) — or I’m doing it wrong.
• Keyboard support? Sure, it starts up with a Squeak VNC server so you can access it externally… and there isn’t a whole lot of screen space on an iPhone in the first place…  but… (Okay, there are examples on using the keyboard in a program written with Squeak… but that isn’t exactly the same thing.) — I’m assuming I’m missing something.

We’ll see what happens.