RunRev CEO Kevin Miller has made an announcement today. The essence of the announcement is: “Steve Jobs has now rejected our proposal and made it clear that he has no interest in having revMobile available on the iPhone or iPad in any form.” http://qurl.tk/ag
According to Runtime Revolution Ltd. “Jobs all but confirmed the analysis on John Gruber’s site.” I’m not sure that this is the correct interpretation, because an e-mail from Steve Jobs said: “We think John Gruber’s post is very insightful and not negative.” I cited this e-mail in an earlier blog post: http://qurl.tk/ai. Of course, Jobs’ words can be interpreted in several ways, but they definitely don’t imply that Flash, RunRev and other platforms are allowed to run in iPhone. The RunRev blog post also says: “In response to a question in a recent Apple shareholder’s meeting, Jobs said that a HyperCard-like product for the iPad would be a good idea ‘though someone would have to build it'” http://qurl.tk/as. Remembering a keynote presented by Steve Jobs, who associated HyperCard with “bullshit” (see http://www.ihug.org), I have to assume that Jobs’ statement is to be taken with a lot of irony. Probably, one is supposed to add “…and it ain’t Apple building that HyperCard-like tool!” Also, I have been unable to find any additional references to Jobs’ statement on the shareholder’s meeting. The same blog post mentions that RevMobile can be used as a prototyping tool for iPhone. “[..] we still believe that revMobile remains the most sophisticated iPhone/iPad prototyping and Enterprise development tool in the world.” I believe this statement to be very true yet very useless. I don’t think RevMobile is a suitable prototyping tool and I won’t be paying a thousand dollar just to be able to make prototypes. There are other, less expensive and more suitable tools for this. RunRev development for iPhone has come to an halt with this announcement: “While we will be shipping revMobile as a product, we reluctantly have no choice but to scale back development on it. We can no longer create the native interface objects layer, but rather invite our community to develop a set of emulated objects. We also will no longer build the native-code compiler, as this is a vast engineering project that’s purpose was to facilitate submission of applications to the app store.” The blog continues to state that RunRev plans to develop an engine for Android: “We are turning our mobile sights to the Android platform, and will unveil an aggressive strategy for supporting Android development projects.” However, I haven’t even heard of a prototype of a preview of a pre-alpha version of this Android engine and Economy-x-Talk won’t be waiting for RunRev for Android to be released. Any Android development will be conducted in a currently available development tool. How does this affect Economy-x-Talk? We surely planned to use RunRev to give new projects a head-start on the iPhone. Now that this appears to become impossible, we will just put a little more time and effort into developing software for iPhone. Your projects are safe with Economy-x-Talk, but the part that was meant to run on iPhone won’t be developed in RunRev. We will be using XCode or other platforms to create the software.If you have any information about RevMobile for Windows Mobile or if you have any other useful info, please go ahead and post a comment here.