Thursday, June 28th, 2007
iPhone Development: Aptana and Morfik
Category: iPhone
People are clamoring on the iPhone buzz to get developers using their products for iPhone development.
Two early IDE folk are Morfik and Aptana:
Aptana iPhone Support
We’ve released the first beta of our iPhone Development Plugin for the Aptana IDE. Since ‘Web 2.0’ is the development model of choice for the iPhone, and that is what the Aptana IDE is all about, it made sense that we’d support it in every way we could. For this first beta, here are the features we have (and some that are coming):
- Preview of your iPhone projects in horizontal or vertical mode
- iPhone Project contains starter files to get you going easily on your iPhones apps
- Several example apps that leverage the iPhone form factor
- Easy import of Ajax libraries into iPhone projects
- Integrated content assist for iPhone-specific APIs (coming soon)
- Help and online documentation (coming soon)
Morfik
Morfik has also provided a web development environment for the iPhone including iChess an example application that works on the iPhone.
Scriptor will have iPhone support released by Friday.
No matter what you think about the “SDK” issues (I am sure you can get some Cocoa going in the future) it is amazing to see how fast these vendors have jumped in, and how fast developers have built applications. And, this is still before the phone is released.
We have done some basic testing on a number of browsers on different Macs and PCs.
A quick summary for the time (in seconds) it takes the browser to respond to D2D4 on level 10 which involves a 5-ply search (which is far below the 10 ply which is typical for most chess engines written for the desktop, ie non-browser, these days)
Dell laptop
Opera – 20
FF2 – 25
IE6 – 40
IE7 – 40
Safari – 35
iMac
Safar 150
FF 90
Camino 90
MacBook
Safar – 20
FF – 15
On an iPhone – watch this space :-)
Freaking cool, that’s what this is. Enter the new era of portable everything.
iChess is kinda cool but,
when you promote a pawn to queen it doesn’t show the queen!
Nice little game tho
And the iChess also doesn’t allow en passant!
Don’t ever use Apatana for editing files via FTP. In some cases it deletes your files: http://www.aptana.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7070#7070
Don’t ever use Aptana for editing files via FTP. In some cases it deletes your files: http://www.aptana.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7070#7070
@PM Maliki
too bad people outside the US can’t get an iPhone
I’ve found that pages that use a lot of client side javascript processing for effects and animation cause my laptop’s CPU to run hotter and for the fan to run. Presumably this is because the processor has to run closer to full speed. The net result is significantly reduced battery life.
iPhones, like laptops, presumably will depend on a lot of power saving features to get good battery life. It will be interesting to see how long the iPhones can go before being charged while using this wave of applications.
The idea behind the Aptana plug-in is great, however on Windows; the browser engine for Eclipse/Aptana is IE. Since the iPhone comes with only Safari, you cant really test your layout, or functionality correctly. What’s nice about building an app solely for the iPhone is that you can leverage webkits’s support for most of the CSS 3 spec and also Canvas. Since the iPhone is on the edge network (sloooow), the slimmer you can make your app, the better and by using CSS 3 properties such as rounded corners, this is possible. Does anyone know of a way to plug the new Window’s Safari into Eclipse or Aptana? If this integration is possible, the Aptana plug-in will be my IDE of choice for iPhone development. Or we might all switch to a Mac and Eclipse.
Is the chess computation done on the client side or server side?
I’m getting the error:
Aptana support for Apple iPhone 01020070681323 requires plug-in com.aptana.ide.core.ui 0.28.15600 or later version
I de-installed the old Aptana version completely and downloaded the newest version and installed it. Upon clicking within Aptana to get the download, a yellow box with the aformentioned error pops up.
Aaron, the chess computation is all client side. Disconnect from the Internet and see it continues to work fine, as long as the browser is kept open.