iPhone 4.0

[Alanfalcon]

John Gruber writes:

Prior to today’s release of the iPhone OS 4 SDK, section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement read, in its entirety:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

In the new version of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement released by Apple today (and which developers must agree to before downloading the 4.0 SDK beta), section 3.3.1 now reads:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch — a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It’s unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, which let developers write JavaScript code that runs in WebKit inside a native iPhone app wrapper. They might be OK. This tweet from the PhoneGap Twitter account suggests they’re not worried. The folks at Appcelerator realize, though, that they might be out of bounds with Titanium. Ansca’s Corona SDK, which lets you write iPhone apps using Lua, strikes me as out of bounds.

Does this then affect the potential iPhone release of Midnight Mansion?

If so it is a true shame because having played with an iPad, Midnight Mansion is an amazing fit for that platform. Hopefully though this doesn't affect your plans at all.

[VernJensen]

It shouldn't affect me one bit. I won't be using Torque for iPhone, as I had considered a while back. Torque is absolutely terrible on iPHone -- slow frame rate, abysmal loading times, etc. That might be fixed with the brand new Torque 2D they're releasing sometime next year, but I'm done with GarageGames for now.

Midnight Mansion is written in straight C, so no problem there. To port it, I've been planning on using SDL, which isn't really a

translation layer

as they describe -- it's just a library in C.

So provided Midnight Mansion 2 wells well, I still fully plan to port Midnight Mansion (and by extension, MM 2) to both iPhone and the iPad and Windows. Hopefully this year.

[Alanfalcon]

695A4D51755A514C5A513F0 wrote: So provided Midnight Mansion 2 wells well, I still fully plan to port Midnight Mansion (and by extension, MM 2) to both iPhone and the iPad and Windows. Hopefully this year.

Awesome, great to hear! And that bit about how poorly games from torque run on the iPhone is probably one of many considerations that Apple took before putting that clause in the developer agreement. Or as Gruber puts it,

Do you think Nintendo would allow Flash-cross-compiled games for the DS or Wii?