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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?"
It's "script manipulation" in the same sense that writing Python would be "script manipulation". TouchStudio contains a turing-complete scripting language that's tailored to working with/on a touchscreen phone.
eg. A screenshot I found on Microsoft Research.
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.
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.