Comments on: Parchment on the iPhone

By: Wiley

Wiley — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:18:32 +0000

also, what all do I need to check out in subversion? I’m not a javascript developer, just a css guy, so I’m a little intimidated by all those files.

By: Wiley

Wiley — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:08:05 +0000

I poked around on the google code pages for it a while back… that’s a lot of scripts, and no documentation. I was able to get my inform story in the right format, but I couldn’t immediately figure out where to change what story file parchment was opening. I’ll take another crack at it though.

By: Atul

Atul — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:18:56 +0000

@Wiley: Not at all! The uses you’re talking about were exactly the kind of thing Parchment was made for… We’ve got a Google Code project up for it here and a mailing list here. Please feel free to drop by and say hello.

By: Wiley

Wiley — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:11:42 +0000

I would really love to be able to use parchment on my site. Having an interactive fiction running as accessible text on a page instead of in some java or flash box opens up a whole universe of possibilities. You could use jquery to turn text into links, or apply custom CSS to it… Unfortunately every time I’ve tried to find out more about using it, I get no response… is this beta software that you don’t want out in the wild beyond the test page you put up?

By: tomh

tomh — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:04:41 +0000

What a great idea for the iphone! I just tried Hitchhikers on it - a couple of points:

I ended up emailing myself the link http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://labs.toolness.com/parchment/infocom/hitchhik.z5 as it was too big to type in, and I couldn’t find it on the Parchment site. Some sort of iphone friendly index page would be very handy.

More importantly, when a command is being entered in Parchment, there are two buttons available “Done” and “return”. It’s not totally clear to me why “Done” doesn’t submit the command, but “Return” does.

Very minor points - just thought you might like some feedback.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:24:43 +0000

A most interesting exploration, Atul. I know this discussion will go round in circles for years to come, but contingently generative is often a benefit to users who are not technically capable of generating content. It gives them (pardon me) someone to blame when quality control goes wrong, especially something related to security. “Apple approved this app; why is it sending my contacts to spammrsrus.org.net.com.info.tv?!?”"

I know you’re talking about community-driven notions of trust to try to replace the central-clearing-house-of-trust. But I maintain that a majority of people who use computers *should not* be expected to understand the technology well enough to participate in such communities. Thus, for many people, the limitations of a trusted central clearing house are more useful than the flexibility of open platforms.

Which is not to say, for even a minute, that it isn’t in the open platforms that much (even most?) technological innovation occurs. Apple has invented precious few new software technologies, borrowing heavily (and often without credit) from the open source community.

Really, I just wish I had voice recognition to play these games… But you can’t have everything in this life, I suppose.

By: MarkC

MarkC — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:02:45 +0000

By far the best handheld z-machine interpreter I’ve used (and perhaps the best, full stop) is YAZI on the Apple Newton. The developers don’t seem to be around anymore, but there’s an old version of their YAZI page on archive.org (check out the screenshots for a better idea of the app): http://web.archive.org/web/20061017021050/www.scrawlsoft.com/products/yazi/info.html

A few things in particular made it great for use with a stylus: there were single-click buttons for many common commands; there was a customisable menu into which you could store your own frequently used commands; most of all, you could click on the words in the output screen to immediately copy them to the input line. These shortcuts mean, for example, that if an item appears in a room description it only takes two clicks to subsequently examine it.

This made it easy to play a game with very little typing needed - ideal for a tablet based machine with no physical keyboard, such as the Newton… or the iPhone. Perhaps it’s worth thinking about a means to add these sort of facilities to Parchment.

By: me

me — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:15:23 +0000

Safari on the iPhone does keep multiple ‘tabs’ open at the same time, unless the one you are viewing uses too much memory. Then it’ll discard the ones you are not viewing (they’ll become blank in the overview screen). The Apple apps work the same way, they’ll be kept in memory unless memory is exhausted.

Not really a problem for me, it’s a phone, not a laptop.