Hacker News Reader

Comment by aphistic | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "Why? Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s because Apple wants to focus on consuming media using these devices, not producing media. Want to be truly computing literate, where you write as well as read? There’s no app for that."

No, it's because (as far as I can tell) the Scratch iPhone app was acting as a Scratch interpreter which is explicitly not allowed on the App Store to begin with.

The authors of the iPhone app (http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Scratch.html) made a nice post in the developer forums (https://devforums.apple.com/thread/46425) pleading their case for any you with access to the forum and an interest in digging deeper.

View on HN

"No, it's because (as far as I can tell) the Scratch iPhone app was acting as a Scratch interpreter which is explicitly not allowed on the App Store to begin with."

Which goes to show, once again, that this policy is really stupid and that it doesn't affect exclusively developers, but also the educational potential so vehemently touted by all the iPad/iPhone/iTouch fans.

So I imagine Apple will soon be taking down the Secret of Money Island and the Sim games, since I know for a fact both of these use interpreters.

No, of course they won't. Because those titles bring in big bucks and are from the types of developer Apple wants to develop for their device.

It the capricious and selective enforcement of the SDKs T&Cs that is the biggest problem for developers. It's not that Apple are against interpreters, they are just against interpreters when it is not financially beneficial to them.

Actually they fully allow interpreters as long as it doesn't allow users to run arbitrary code. They allowed the Commodore 64 emulator once direct access to the BASIC interpreter was removed: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/10/iphone-commodore-64-emulat...

Of course, all these products were put into the app store before rule 3.3.1.

Let's keep it accurate -- that's rule 3.3.2: "No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

When the C64 emulator was released, that "or" was an "and". Now they don't allow non-Apple interpreters at all. (Unless they feel like it.)

That post really puts the "C/C++/Obj-C" thing into much starker relief than the "wish I could use lisp" discussion. Geeks can get around 3.3.1 if they're clever enough; replacing a democratizing technology like Scratch, on the other hand, may be impossible.

That said, if their app really was an interpreter, I'm surprised it made it into the store in the first place. And if anything, the typical Scratch output of a crayon-drawn animation designed by a 13-year-old only bolsters Jobs' point about cross-compilers bringing down the average app quality. But I'm very impressed that they had Scratch working on the platform and I hope Apple can find a way to incorporate that educational mission into their world-domination strategy...

They built it on top of Squeak. That thing is one of the most straightforward VMs to port. The runtimes execute bit-identical. Years ago they were on 40 different platforms, and I've lost track. It's an incredibly elegant architecture.

That's cool. Should have said "happy" instead of "impressed" -- knowing nothing about the technical side, I was imagining the impact of letting kids program ipods/iphones. They must have loved that.

One javascript implementation is the lively kernel, here http://www.lively-kernel.org/

I'd bet there are others.

It should be possible to create a Scratch execution environment on top of Javascript/Safari. A cross compiler done correctly might run faster than the "native" Squeak VM.

Do you know if anyone has built anything non-trivial with Clamato?

(http://clamato.net/)

I've certainly built stuff with it that is useful, and some if it is even production, but none of it as complex as, say, the Clamato environment itself.

I don't know of anyone else who has.

But then the program is still not originally written in JavaScript, so no dice. I think a subset of JavaScript plus a nice library would be ok, though.

But then the program is still not originally written in JavaScript, so no dice.

I believe he meant as a web app.

It would be great if someone could copy the text of their post. My developer account recently expired and I don't really want to pay $99 just to view one forum post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com