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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Notably, this fits into YC's "Request for Startups #5: Development on Handlhelds":

Honestly, having experimented with various devices, I'm not sure there's a productive development environment out there with a keyboard. A tablet in a keyboard dock may well do the job, but if the keyboard is required for useful work don't we then have a de facto netbook?

Which is what I use, incidentally. Currently 10" but has been 9" before. Running Visual Studio 2010 for the zoomable IDE, and I find it makes a very nice development platform. Highly recommended for such use.

Because the tablet is a variable geometry device. You can develop on the device with keyboard, take the device away without the keyboard and play your game. Then hit a bug and fix it on the spot with the OSK.

Besides developing NUI apps straight on the device is interesting, instead of developing on a machine then upload and test on a tethered device.

Only partially. This code isn't portable. This is more analogous to a game engine, it's a development engine. Along with not being portable, the code can't be distributed. If the developer offered some package with their rendering engine for purchase outside the app store, then other devs could publish games using this development engine.

It's pretty obvious that is the something that will come in another release.

Edit: Also, plenty of value is created by programs that had thick "runtimes". Think of anything from Visual Basic to Hypercard to things like Excel spreadsheets.

It looks like this is something that the developer is already thinking about. https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/129304975623995395

Oh no I am speaking of licensing the graphics engine underneath to devs so they can distribute their own standalone games in the app store, without users having to download this app.

Is there a particular reason why you think this won't happen at some point in the future, too?

Any particular reason? I'm not working on this particular project, I have no idea what the dev has planned. I like imagination, but I don't like speculation. So I'm just not in the mood to speculate on it.

It seems like it'd be pretty easy to have do "something" on a server, and then just mail you the package you need to submit to Apple, given a few extra bits of data.

To the point where I've been thinking about doing it for a long while, but clearly someone was way ahead of me. :)

Only partially. This code isn't portable. This is more analogous to a game engine, it's a development engine.

The way you worded this reminds me of Gary Kitchen's Game Maker.

http://www.garrykitchen.com/product_history/garry_kitchens_g...

Well there are ports of Squeak (Smalltalk) Cog VM on Android (CogDroid [1]), and to iOS (see e. g. [2]) which are capable of running recent Squeak and Pharo images and are development environments on their own. (Disclaimer: I am a co-developer of [1])

[1] http://code.google.com/p/squeakvm-tablet/

[2] http://news.squeak.org/2010/06/17/squeak-running-on-ipad/

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