Script Your Phone on Your Phone

[ErosOlmi]

Script Your Phone on Your Phone

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Peli/TouchStudio-Script-Your-Phone-on-Your-Phone-Reloaded

[Petr Schreiber]

I liked the demonstration very much, because the process of programming is very similar to way I do it on my HP-42s calculator - not much typing, commands are picked from the onscreen menus. If the command menu hierarchy is done well, this can result in very fast coding.

Very nice, I didn't heard about this project before :)


Petr

[John Spikowski]

Viewing media from Microsoft is going to be a problem for others not running IE with SilverLight. I thought MS learned their lesson when they tried forcing ActiveX as a browser component standard. This is good example why I don't use Microsoft products any longer.

[ErosOlmi]

I only use Chrome and never had any problem.

[Charles Pegge]

Do you think it would be beneficial to be able to program this way on a PC?

I like the idea of not having to worry about syntax or spend time looking up complex functions and their parameters.

Charles

[John Spikowski]

Do you think it would be beneficial to be able to program this way on a PC?

You can, ScriptBasic gives you a no-nonsense scripting solution on ALL major platforms. (32/64 bit)


I like the idea of not having to worry about syntax or spend time looking up complex functions and their parameters.

Not having to declare, dimension or define variables also makes programming in ScriptBasic a joy. There is nothing wrong with hiding complexity under the covers if it makes getting the job done easier.

[kryton9]

Whenever I saw them program on Star Trek The Next Generation, especially Holodeck programming... I always thought it has to be a visual programming system, although they showed Data usually typing super fast. In reality, to run starships, I think we need to get really well laid out visual programming languages. For example in battle:

The Weapons Officer would have available weapons as icons. Then icons for quick select buttons, all forward weapons, all aft weapons etc. Depending on the weapon selected a prompt for how many to load and then fire, or abort. Or I guess Data could type in: Weapons.GetAvailableList().Select(Torpedoes).LoadAllForward(4).Fire(Now)

[Petr Schreiber]

You can, ScriptBasic gives you a no-nonsense scripting solution on ALL major platforms. (32/64 bit)

Not having to declare, dimension or define variables also makes programming in ScriptBasic a joy. There is nothing wrong with hiding complexity under the covers if it makes getting the job done easier.
Meeting more and more marketing/PR guys makes me used to this kind of rhetoric, but sometimes I cannot resist a smile :)

I think the way the program is entered on the video (that is organised system of menus), is something currently implemented as intellisense in Microsoft dev tools IDEs. I take intellisense as evolution of this system - it is not just simple word-completion engine. In OOP designed world, it is easy to chain the actions exactly as Kent wrote. Especially if the IDE has enough "meta" info about the classes, it can flow very naturally.

The command menu approach is definitely better on mobile devices, including calculators (except the few coming with full QWERTY keyboard) from my experience, but on devices with keyboard I prefer the intellisense way.


Petr

[Charles Pegge]

Hi Petr,

Evolution is the operative word here. I think there is a huge amount of work that would need to go into developing a mature command-menu system.

One could at least start it in a very simple way, and build gradually. I can see a way of doing it, providing there is an early pay-back in terms of more efficient code production, and less to think about when designing new programs.

Charles

[John Spikowski]

Meeting more and more marketing/PR guys makes me used to this kind of rhetoric, but sometimes I cannot resist a smile


I would be willing to bet you haven't even bothered to try ScriptBasic. If you can find an easier to use Basic then SB, I would be happy to hear about it. (even if it sounds like marketing rhetoric)

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi John,

yes I tried SB some time ago. The main reason of my note was that I didn't see any link between what you wrote and the main issues discussed in the video, which is IDE with easy to use input system for cellphones + language direct access to specific hardware features such as accelerometer.


Petr

[John Spikowski]

I wasn't able to watch the video on Ubuntu & Firefox.

I misunderstood and assumed that the topic was about scripting cell phones. ScriptBasic is being used in a commercial router as it's scripting language and by the University of Toronto to control all their environmental systems. (6 million sq. ft.) SB is embedded in custom controllers running an embeddable centric Linux.

JavaScript is the browsers scripting language. That seems to be a given.

I'm not sure if there is a scripting standard in place for mobile devices. By default, ScriptBasic is an embeddable script language. That in itself makes it an ideal scripting candidate.

[Petr Schreiber]

There is some text/picture information available on the topic:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/

The video is scripting related, but the focus is on the two areas I mentioned previously. I am not sure if the article will give you the same informational value as video, as seeing it in action is better.

What I am still not convinced about is the highlevel syntax structure with long lines. On small display the word wrapped lines look not so good. Second extreme is one instruction per line (like on calculators or assembler), which has easy to follow structure, but forces user to scroll like mad and decoding more complex expressions becomes tiring.

I am curious if "something between" could be invented. Maybe just using the phone in landscape orientation and with horizontal scrollbar would help the first approach.


Petr

[John Spikowski]

I will be demonstrating a high level GTK based GUI syntax for ScriptBasic soon. I'm not interested in Android as a development platform.