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"Instead, they will go to the carefully-screened App Store, and they will search for “How do I make video games”, and they will find a little button that teaches them and gives them a run-time environment in which to tinker."

A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.

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I responded to that in the other thread about this article. It's a damn shame.

Can you make one that downloads to the iPhone/iPad and run natively? There's nothing in an RTE that needs to access Internet files, right? So theoretically you could program it in its entirety and have people download that.

I'm sorry I didn't know that when I wrote the article, though; certainly it throws a nasty complication into the works.

I haven't really programmed the iPhone yet, so I am not sure. However, I must admit there might be one way out: there is a JavaScript interpreter on the iPhone. I guess if you made a simple form and had it's contents be evaluated by JavaScript at the press of a button, Apple would OK it (not certain, though). Unfortunately JavaScript is quite restricted on the iPhone, too (I've heard it just gets killed if it runs too long, too long being on the order of seconds).

Not sure what Apple would say if you wrote an interpreter for something else than JavaScript in JavaScript...

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