{"id":99,"date":"2008-07-11T11:42:18","date_gmt":"2008-07-11T16:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=99"},"modified":"2008-07-11T11:42:18","modified_gmt":"2008-07-11T16:42:18","slug":"text-adventures-on-the-iphone-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Text Adventures on the iPhone… or not."},"content":{"rendered":"

As many folks know, I’m a huge fan of Interactive Fiction<\/a> (text adventures). I’ve been working on a z-machine interpreter for Android<\/a>, as well one that runs in python<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As of today, my iPhone is able to download ‘legitimate’ apps from the AppStore, and there’s still no z-machine interpreter available. For over a year now, there’s been one which requires a jailbroken iPhone<\/a> out there, but jailbreaking isn’t an option for me (since Google owns my phone.)<\/p>\n

My hopes got up when I discovered that the author of Zoom<\/a> (the best z-machine app for Mac OS X) is actively working on a legitimate iPhone port. However, something he posted<\/a> really disturbs me:<\/p>\n

\n“A more serious issue is that Apple\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s SDK license prohibits downloading code to interpret: this means that it would be impossible to load any games that were not bundled with the interpreter. I think this is probably a fatal problem: it seems doubtful that many IF authors will be willing to pay the $99 required to get their work onto the iPhone – plus it would mean no Zork, ever.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While it sure is convenient that iPhone users only have one place to check for apps, this really scares me. I’m guessing that the license is intended to prevent people from distributing generic JVM or CLR machines that can download and run any old code, thereby circumventing Apple’s ability to vet applications. But clearly their Safari web browser already downloads and interprets Javascript apps, right? Where does one draw the line? We’re talking about a VM to play text-adventures — would Apple consider the fetching of text-adventures dangerous?<\/p>\n

More and more, it’s clear to me that Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, they’re just not as big and powerful (yet)… and they have better taste. Maybe I should give up on issue and just wait for my Android phone at the end of the year. It will be a truly open OS, and I’ll be able to download and run whatever the heck I want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many folks know, I’m a huge fan of Interactive Fiction (text adventures). I’ve been working on a z-machine interpreter for Android, as well one that runs in python. As of today, my iPhone is able to download ‘legitimate’ apps from the AppStore, and there’s still no z-machine interpreter available. For over a year now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}