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Microsoft TouchStudio Uses Phone To Program Phone
theodp writes "Over the weekend, Microsoft released the beta of TouchStudio, a free Windows Phone app that allows one to write programs for a phone on the very same phone, no computer required. According to the Microsoft Research project page, the work-in-progress TouchStudio aims to bring 'the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone.' Among the code examples provided is a four-liner that scans a phone's music collection for songs less than three minutes long and produces a fairly slick, clickable playlist complete with track info and artwork. Easier than iPhone SDK programming, no?"
Haven't jailbroken iOS users had compilers / text editors on their phones for years now? I know I personally have..
Teaching everyone to program on an affordable platform like this is a very neat move, and undoes the damage done by companies that provide "Mothership System" based software development. It means we will have better software in the future as kids can now learn development early enough on a platform they are familiar with. I hope they put it on every device.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I never trust the "look at what we just did in only 100 lines or less" examples. Such examples rarely indicate a "thought of everything" programming environment, instead usually indicating a "we made assumptions about everything and you'll either like it or spend hours hacking around it" environment.
The four line example given doesn't make it clear what database it's pulling that from, what if the user has an Amazon Cloud Music service and player? Will it find those as well?
So, it appears to be not true programming, but just script manipulation? Wouldn't that be like Tasker for Android?
http://tasker.dinglisch.net/
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
I admit that this can't be done on a stock iPhone, but the whole innovation is that they're writing code on a mobile device, which people have been doing for years, in fact completely set up by end users.
This is very important because they will probably try to patent this idea with a view to stopping other people doing it. Having a ready list of prior art could prevent that
I had Python on my Nokia N80...
whats the big deal?
Not a new concept, mShell for Symbian
It's a trick and I know a lot of slashdotters are falling for it RIGHT NOW !!
It is a very cool tool.
I don't know if mshell or other mobile programming languages have any real system integration this thing does. Sort of reminds me of hacking in AppleScript.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Reminds me of OPL (Open Programming Language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Programming_Language that was embedded by default on the Psion Series 5mx.
I had great fun making stupid applications on that thing back in high school.
Easier than writing an Objective C program to do the same, very likely. Most people would find it easier to create a smart playlist in iTunes to do the same though.
On the bright side: there is now an app in the Microsoft app store.
And here I am, reprogramming my phone with pliers, soldering iron, some wires, a(n) USB connector and a resistor. I must be doing something wrong.
Wow, we're catching up with what Symbian could do in 1998 (Symbian devices came with OPL, a BASIC-like language which you could code with on the device itself. Indeed, there was a booming Shareware market as people wrote their own games and utilities etc). OPL made it onto phones with the Nokia Communicator running SymbianOS 6.
Maybe next we'll have a story about being able to embed objects in the build-in word processor and spreadsheet, for example embedding a chart which can be edited OLE-like in situ just by double-tapping it...
It's depressing to see how Nokia threw all that away and dumbed-down Symbian. One step forwards and five steps backwards....
Looks kinda cool, sort of like android-scripting done right! :) I guess SL4A is a bit more flexbile in that you can choose between several languages, but the user-friendliness is not very high imo.
I'm actually somewhat surprised that Apple hasn't been supportive of a native scripting platform or programming tool. I can understand that there would be more work involved in developing the SDK, but the utility of having this feature would be tremendous. At the very least, it would inflate the number of apps in the App Store.
I know Android has this capability from third-party support; has anyone played around with this?
Android has had more powerful scripting for quite some time: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
The Nokia N900 came factory default with a text editor, xterm and a python runtime with sdl bindings.
So, when can be have an ultra-portable device with on-the-go programming in mind? I'd find it very amusing/interesting to pound out a program while waiting at the bus stop.
would be so much happier with a N900 running vi & gcc.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I survived my CS modules in junior college with vim and gcc on a 3.7 inch N800. Painful? Yes. Worth it? no.
"TouchStudio aims to bring 'the excitement of the first programmable personal computers to the phone.' "
So Integer BASIC and assembler? Pinch me.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Of course it's easier than iPhone SDK - Apple users are idiots and Microsoft's entire business is founded on catering to developer tools thereby outsourcing much of the development that goes into the value of their platforms. What would be really cool though, is object oriented image recognition built into the SDK.
This looks cool. Regardless of what everyone is saying about this kind of thing being done before. who cares about that really? The fact is its now available on WP7, and some of you need to grow up already. I'm about furthest you can get from a Microsoft fanboy, but MS continues to bring features like this to their users on a great platform and thats why they continue to make money; lots of it. I hope that WP7 continues to do better and better so android and ios have more competition, no clear winner in the industry means the users are the winner and that I'm a fan of.
It's been a long time since that was my first raction to a Microsoft product, but this thing looks neat in every sense of the word -- a fine UI to throw some code together on a small display; and it reminds me of ChipWits, Lego Mindstorm and other such easily graspable perspectives on what is undeniably a very complicated topic.
The thing is, of course, how much integration this app has with the rest of the system. It can evidently hook into the file system, and I wonder if it can know, ask, or be told what other applications are installed and what they're up to (that is more or less what the HackMaster app did on PalmOS, which was exceedingly powerful yet relatively simple given that it was an event-driven (as opposed to multitasking) OS).
I say godspeed to this project, and I hope they'll allow others to follow in their footsteps.
"Good news, everyone!"
I constantly see comments on here about how phones and tablets are crippled devices that could never be real tools because you can't do things like programming on them. Then MS (the great and scary evil thing) makes something you can program on and now it's "lame, late, not good enough". Just come to grips with your biases please.
It can also be done in four lines of applescript:
So.. get on it apple. make applescript and smart playlists available in iPods and iPhones already...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's not an either/or, you can have a user-friendly phone with advanced features
Unless the carriers don't want to carry your phone. In the United States, the big three wireless carriers have only a small selection of phones, and they tend to shun anything that gives the user too much freedom. Nokia hasn't been able to get any major U.S. carrier to take the N900 (for which I'd appreciate corrections), and buying a phone and service separately is something that the vast majority of subscribers just don't do, for various reasons. Verizon and Sprint, which use CDMA2000, are reluctant to activate any phone that they didn't sell. Even AT&T, whose GSM system in theory lets subscribers bring their own phone, still forces each subscriber to take a "free" phone whose price is included in the monthly bill instead of giving a discount on the monthly bill for not providing a phone.
I was doing cross-platform development in 1981. So long as I have proper emulation of the target machine, why should I care? The only thing I want to be able to do on the target as regards development is rapid and efficient debug.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
but the whole innovation is that they're writing code on a mobile device, which people have been doing for years
They've been doing so since laptops were invented. And if you mean mobile devices that fit in a pocket, they've been doing so since Python was ported to Pocket PC. What's the big difference?
Microsoft better make very certain it doesnt license TouchStudio to the catholic church. Thats the last thing they need right now.
You've been able to program on an Android phone for quite a while now. Android Script Engine
Not if you have AT&T. From the android-scripting page: "you will need to enable the 'Unknown sources' option".
could. but it's (terrifying death star) bigger than a toaster, & smaller than a toyota (looks like the sun because it's on fire), so what size rounds to use is the first question? or is the first question how scared are we supposed to be today...? or, could a flying toyota ever do as much damage all told as we're doing every day now? or, where is the best place to hide (near uncle sam & god)?
so, the answer is yes, any size object(s) can be redirected/vaporized. just look at us.
we heard you like to program, so we put the program in your phone so you can program while you phone
Yo dawg, we heard you like to program and fuck around on your phone, so we put a development environment in your phone so you can program while you fuck around on your phone.
I challenge you to create this program on itself. Recursion is always fun.
T-Mobile
I understand that currently, T-Mobile USA offers a plan designed for people who bring their own phones. I predict that this will end once AT&T completes its acquisition of T-Mobile USA.
The "/. crowd" that you refer to has long since moved on. The current stable of users and contributors are primarily Wired readers and other "gadgeteer" types. Just don't tell that to the advertisers, who are being sold on the (now quaint) notion that the readership is comprised of IT Industry decision-makers.
It's not excitement unless you're programming in hand-optimized assembly like a real programmer.
I wrote Final Fantasy XI Timer for Palm entirely on my Palm Tungsten W using the PP compiler. There where several other compiler for Palm as well.
I'm also hoping to write application on my Palm Pre. I already released an update to Terminal by compiling it with gcc right on my Palm Pre.
So they finally caught up to where palmOS phones were 10 years ago, nice.
I've been able to program on my phone since my Treo 650. The Nokia N900 just takes it to a whole new level.
Nathan's blog
Uh, the phone is a computer, dimwit.
Srsly, WTF?
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Then there are the words where the n has shifted. The snake was originally a nadder, and the fruit original a norange. But the n has gone for a walk; we now have an adder and an orange.
Anyone who reports any aspect of English grammar as having "no exceptions" is more than not likely to be wrong. English is a bastard language developed by bastards - and I, as a typical English person with 100% purebred French/Jewish/Saxon/Norman ancestry, like it that way.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...why those early computers were so exciting and so much fun ???
Because that was before Microsoft came along and told them what they could
and ( mostly ) couldn't do with the hardware they had just purchased,
and how much much more it was going to cost them to do even that !
You can write shell scripts on many handheld devices. One of the more interesting features of TouchStudio is that it has an interface akin to a calculator. A complete novice could write a 'foreach' loop as easily as they could do simple math functions -- no shell scripting expertise required.
This is not new
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Programming_Language
Just better marketing
will totally love this
No.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.