Entries Tagged 'iPhone' ↓

Yes, that’s right, ladies and gents. Thanks the hackery of a great many individuals (no, I am not among them), just this evening, I ran the following on my iPhone:

ruby -e “10.times { puts ‘foo’ }”

You can guess what happened.

Here’s how you do it, in short order, with minimal agony: Use the unofficial Installer.app developed by some folks at NullRiver. That’s it! From there, install the “Community Sources”, install “Ruby”, the BSD extensions, and “Mobile Terminal” and then go rubify yourself.

Ironically, this is not officially a product of theirs — more than likely because it is unwise to declare third party software for the iPhone as an official product at this tenuous time.

I wonder how long it will be before some intrepid Ruby coder works out a way to get to UIKit easily from Ruby and gens up some rdoc for it. I wonder if SWIG would help here?

Just for giggles, I tried:

ruby -e ’start=Time.now;a=1;b=1;1000000.times {a=a+b};puts a;puts “time: #{Time.now - start}”‘”

On my 2.16 Ghz Core Duo Macbook Pro, this took 0.280763 seconds. On the iPhone, this took 10.060393 seconds.

Looks like a speed difference of a factor of 50 for this simple computation.

Update: Um, ok, maybe it’s closer to 36 than 50.

Ordinarily, I would not blog “gadget” here. However, as a would-be iPhone developer and a new user, I have some bones to pick. I call this my “What the hell were the iPhone designers smoking?” list.

• For whatever reason, Apple didn’t include a mass e-mail deletion utility. While most folks are not likely to be on 10 or more listservs about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, several are likely to have a PEBKAC moment and download their entire collection of e-mail to their iPhone. What oh what to do? I suppose it’s just time to sit in a corner, cry, get angry, accept your situation, and then begin the arduous and tedious task of deleting e-mails one by one…(Update: Alternatively, host your e-mail on IMAP and manage bulk mail activities from a dekstop mail client)
• Why can’t I save images from Safari and E-mail to my “Photo” list (for use as wallpaper or just to add to my collection)? Many of those crazy enough to pick up an iPhone on launch day will have something like a Flickr account. Sure, there’s a workaround:
  1. Save image to hard drive
  2. Add to iPhoto (You’re on a PC, you say? Oops…)
  3. Put photo in album
  4. Sync album to iPhone
  5. Create wallpaper from new photo on iPhone
  Meh.
• If we’re limited to “web applications” for 3rd party software, why oh why can’t the iPhone save pages in memory to its generous 4/8GBs of storage? If I have an application that is one HTML file with associated CSS and JavaScript and data being saved to a cookie, this just makes common sense. I already love OneTrip but everytime you load it over EDGE a kitten cries…
• The Calendar is nice but To-Do lists, anyone? I suppose that none of the iPhone devs are GTDers…..
• No copy/paste? Three letters: WTF?
• Turn by turn Google Map instructions but no GPS — not even “poor man’s GPS” triangulating your location based on nearby cell towers? E911 already does it….
• Did I mention that interacting with the screen while Safari is loading a complex web page (try http://iphoneapplicationlist.com/) will cause Safari to “crash” and dump you back to the iPhone home screen.

Is this why Leopard was delayed in favor of the iPhone? Too much scope, too few resources?

Don’t misunderstand, I love my iPhone. However, I still see it as a v0.95 product — just one that, so far, has bugs/quirks that I can work around.