BASIC for the iPhone

This year C4[1] played host to Iron Coder Live. The API was "iPhone" and the theme was "conspiracy". The winner was well-deserved. But I had fun doing a hack of my own.

There was just one problem: I don't have an iPhone.

As I was driving from Cleveland to Chicago, I had a lot of time—about five hours—to think about what I might do for the contest. Without an actual iPhone it had to be something that could be largely developed offline and only run on the phone at the contest. That meant that I would need to stick to the, ahem, "official API" of the iPhone: HTML and JavaScript.

Although the phone is cool, I think it's even cooler that a whole community has built up to create the SDK that Apple failed to provide. After talking with some old friends at the conference I decided that it would be fun to join the conspiracy and create my own SDK for the iPhone, offering the ultimate retro-cool language: BASIC for the iPhone.

The version I showed at the conference garnered a very respectable 5th place, which I'm more than satisfied with considering its far more polished competition. I've since cleaned it up, GPLed it, and rechristened it. And here it is:

ippleSoft BASIC

The interface has been scaled for the iPhone, but it works just fine in Safari and Firefox.

• ippleSoft BASIC for the iPhone - Run it now!
• View the source
• Command reference - also available by entering HELP at the prompt.

Notes

Naming: I tried to pick a name that wouldn't infringe on anyone's existing trademark. That's harder than you might think: "iPhone BASIC" would surely lead to a cease-and-desist letter from the hounds. iBASIC, IP-BASIC, etc were all taken. Then I ran into a stroke of luck: It turns out "AppleSoft" is no longer a registered trademark of Apple. They let it expire in 2001. Thus: ippleSoft.

Entirely JavaScript, entirely free. I've made it available under GPL v2. There's no public repository yet, but hey, it's GPL, so you can go and create one yourself. I've released code into the public domain before, but this is the first project I've ever released under GPL.

I'm not a JavaScript programmer. I learned about the language and tried to follow best practice, though. Well, as much as I could during a single beer-soaked weekend.

Autoscroll: The output display will autoscroll in Mac Safari, but not iPhone Mobile Safari. You can flick the output display to scroll it, though. If anyone with an iPhone has a suggestion on how to make it autoscroll properly please let me know!

Language: For now I've kept it pretty close to a strict subset of AppleSoft BASIC. There's a lot it doesn't do yet: graphics and text positioning are not supported, and neither are INPUT or GET. Those are pretty high on the list of priorities though.

One final thought

You know what? Text-based interfaces suck on the iPhone. There's just no getting around this. It's not the output so much as the input. The iPhone feels great when you're pushing buttons and flicking the display to scroll. But the keyboard is really lame.

I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug for ippleSoft BASIC. Personally I find it kind of perversely amusing to use the iPhone to run a language originally designed for teletypes. But it would be interesting to explore ways to take the text out of BASIC.

Loading and running programs from elsewhere on the web would be a natural. A keyword-board like the one on the Timex-Sinclair TS1000 might be useful if you really must write code on the iPhone. INPUT and GET may need to be supplemented with some type of dialog interface. Anything else?

What do you think?