This is a bunch of philosophical notes on blue sky ideas, examining competition, and so on. It ends with .org because it’s a collapsible outline meant for Emacs’ org-mode.
This interpreter really is the Gold Standard for IF terps on mobile devices, in my opinion. I want to imitate a whole bunch of their design decisions!
Twisty shows 3-built-in games on a menu key, and presents an ‘open’ menu choice which eventually lists every game it can find in a folder, as a long pop-up list to poke.
Frotz, however, has story-browsing as a whole separate activity. Assuming someone has dozens of stories, this makes for a much more elegant scrolling list.
Frotz opens a web page to the IFDB searchbox, and allows you to browse IFDB’s website directly. When you click on a story-file link, it uncompresses the story from the internal bundle.
Obviously, this is a hack, since iOS terms-of-service disallows apps to fetch executables off the network. If the storyfile you want isn’t in the internal bundle already, Frotz’s only workaround is to run an FTP server and allow you to ‘push’ the story to your device from a big computer. Laaaaaaaame, but a sensible workaround.
For Twisty, clicking a .z link in the browser should trigger Twisty as the ‘handler’; most of this work is already done. Before executing teh story, we need to make sure the file is first copied into the stories folder, so it will show up in all futer local-story-browser listing.
During a game-in-progress, switching to any new activity causes Frotz to auto-save. Returning to Frotz resumes the auto-saved game. It appears that each game in the local-story-browser has its own latest auto-save game that’s automatically resumed when the story is re-selected. Very slick.
It also keeps each story’s set of savegames seperate from each other. In other words, when I enter ‘restore’, I only see savegames for the current story.
Even cooler is the acknowledgement that you’ll want to continue playing the story as you switch between different devices, much the way my Kindle book always goes to the latest page when I switch between e-reader, phone, laptop.
Frotz handles this by auto-syncing the local story folder with a DropBox folder. For Twisty, we know the user already has a Google account (it’s Android), so we’d just push/pull savegames to a folder in their Google Docs service. The question is whether this can be an effortless auto-sync, or whether the user needs to initiate specific push/pulls. (Does Google Docs have a ‘sync’ concept at all?)
Frotz buries pages of introductory instructions within settings menus, which is pretty nice:
- About Frotz => describes what the app can do, how to use it in general
- Getting Started => tutorial for IF commands
- What’s New
Frotz’s settings lets you set the default:
- Text color ==> color wheel activity
- Background color
- Font face ==> opens a visual list of fonts
- Font size (as a SLIDER, duh)
Frotz pops up word suggestions right above your half-typed word, and when you hit space, it finishes typing the word for you. Standard iOS stuff.
Does Twisty need to do this? The software keyboard (IME) may already be creating word suggestions anyway; the trick is to make it suggest completions of standard IF verbs.
Frotz also imitates an old IF terp I used to run on my Apple Newton: double-tap any word already on the screen, and it copies that word to the command prompt. Killer.