iFrotz has been made available in the application store… so it would seem that Apple is allowing z-code interpretation and programs. It provides access to the IFDB so that additional games may be downloaded. Other applications (e.g. e-readers) provide the ability to specify a website using the browser and downloading eTexts that way. Perhaps you could provide the same capability. In this way (admittedly the worst case) a person could bring up a temporary ftp or http service on their computer and access the files using the browser to pull them onto the iPhone… voila… Zork on the iPhone.

Cheers,
Dwayne

The reason is probably similar to the reason they ban plug-ins: they don’t want anyone creating an application that can be used to circumvent the App Store. The clause is in a section of the license where things seem to be up for negotiation, so there may be some leeway depending on what you’re doing – however, it doesn’t have the ‘without our permission’ wording that the other clauses in that section have.

I plan on asking them: however, I suspect the answer may be no: Apple may not consider IF important enough for an exemption, especially given that Sun and Adobe have both had to retract product announcements over this clause. I also suspect that Apple’s stance may change over time; they have probably chosen to be as stringent as possible with the initial clause, knowing that it would be harder to add new restrictions than it would be to remove old ones (certainly this is what happened with Palm, where the open source tools were initially frowned upon and gradually got more acceptance as time goes by).

“A more serious issue is that Apple’s 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.”

If this is true, I’m really horrified. I’m one of the project members of a z-machine for Android (http://code.google.com/p/twisty), and now I’m starting to realize that maybe freedom really does matter. I’m sort of shocked that Apple is being this restrictive. I wonder if we can get some sort of exception from Apple for your one app. They’re clearly trying to prevent people from implementing generic JVM or CLR interpreters that ‘break’ the appstore distribution model by allowing a separate ecosystem of apps to run unchecked. But text-adventures seem pretty harmless.

If this is really a dead-end, I’d like to know. It makes me realize how important opensource OS’s like Android really are.

I want to appreciate the work you are both putting into making IF available on the iPhone. I believe it is important also for spreading of the IF in general. iPhone is stylish and popular but it also has what it takes to actually support the playing of IF: the display has a high enough resolution, the typing corrections as tweaked by Craig in iFrotz are great, and best of all, it is MacOS-based so it will (hopefully) not be difficult to port Zoom onto.

I cannot wait to slide my finger across the coverflow of IF titles and enjoy both zcode and glulx titles while on the go!

I wish you good luck,

Pavel

I’ve been meaning to contact you for quite a while, but stumbling upon this post finally gave me the impetus to do it.

I am the author of iFrotz (see website link), a port of frotz for jailbroken iPhones. Judging from the statement above (“I imagine a glulx or frotz-based interpreter is likely to be released first”), I gather that you haven’t heard of iFrotz. iFrotz has been available since last fall, and was one of the first 3rd party programs available for ‘hacked’ iPhones.

I’m thrilled that you are interested in porting your IF work to the iPhone. I actually initially began to port Zoom to the iPhone first, but backed down and made an iPhone UI for frotz instead for 2 reasons:

1) The iPhone wasn’t available in the UK at the time, and I figured that, should you turn out to be an iPhone fan, it would be rude to go and port your work when you weren’t even able to buy the device yet
2) The hacker tools for developing for jailbroken iPhones were pretty primitive at the time, and it was necessary to work around lots of issues, so starting with a large Objective C source base and attempting to figure out all the compilation issues in it was daunting, not to mention the UI API differences.

And so iFrotz was born… Alas, since frotz was a pretty hackish, poorly designed source base to begin with., and this was my first real exposure to Objective C, while I can say that while I am happy that I was the first to allow people to play ZMachine-based IF on the iPhone, I’m not particularly proud of the program and would love to see Zoom/CocoaGlk ported.

So I look forward to seeing the best IF interpreter/UI for the Mac become the best IF for the iPhone, and would be happy to volunteer to help you if I can. Even if I hadn’t seen this post, I probably would’ve contacted you before too long about this anyway now that the official SDK it out.

(By the way, the iPhone doesn’t actually have an NSTextView class, but has a class called UITextView which is at least superficially similar, although it uses an HTML layout engine underneath the hood (and I don’t think NSTextView does, although I’m not positive).

Best regards,
Craig Smith