Using mobile devices to create IF

Has anyone found a platform for IF creation that works on mobile?

Obviously Inform and TADS are out of the question. The two I’ve tried are Twine and Inklewriter. Both seemed like they would be perfect except for one problem: scrolling!

For instance, Inklewriter would be incredibly easy to program on a phone or tablet, but it simply does not scroll with finger swipes, which is odd, because the input is almost exactly like the output.

Has anyone found a way to program on mobile?

I’m using Inform 7 on an Android pad. It’s a beta version that seems to have stalled at beta. The compiler and the release mechanism work fine, but the IDE is flaky. You have to generate a z8 output and run it on a z interpreter.

My dev route is: Droidedit, Inform, copy the output.z8 to Download, Text Fiction, delete previous output, import new output.z8 to Text Fiction, test… return to droidedit.

My… it’s easier on the pc!

If yours is an Android mobile, you should find Droidedit quite good, whatever if engine you are writing for.

Wunderverse on iPad.

On a mobile you may be able to use an online editor such as:

twinery.org/2/ - Twine
choiceofgames.com/make-your- … ipt-intro/
playfic.com/ - Inform 7 version 6G60
textadventures.co.uk/squiffy

and others.

As gil suggested, if you have to deal with an IDE that doesn’t scroll, any kind of text editor should support scrolling. Look for one that can “share” the text with other apps - this will be a shortcut to get the source code into the IDE.

1 Like

Hey, if I’d known about playfic, I might never have gone through the pain of Android Inform 7 beta.

OTOH, I’ve been able to build and test code without a WiFi connection.

And, yes, Droidedit can edit the source file from the Inform 7 Android beta.

If Texture ever comes out of alpha - that system was designed specifically for authoring on touchscreen devices.

nitku.net/blog/2014/11/introducing-texture/

I LOVE TEXTURE and wish it would be updated.

Edit: oh heck, authoring on mobile, not for mobile. I misunderstood! Move along, nothing to see here.

I just started using Playfic.com and everything seems to be going swimmingly on my Android phone. Thanks for the tip!

Don’t you have trouble using Playfic on mobiles on account of tab indentation? Or do Android keyboards have tab buttons?

4 spaces is a tab

Oh, that’s handy! Nice shortcut!

“Hacker’s Keyboard” for Android has a tab button, and it’s probably not the only one.

Playfic’s text field doesn’t capture the tab key though, so the tab key just changes focus to the next thing on the page. This is true in a desktop browser too.

Speaking of Web-based editors, I wrote a bunch of experimental code in Seltani from my phone. It was a nice experience. My phone had a hardware keyboard at the time, which probably helped.

Oh, cool. :slight_smile:

Somehow spaces and tabs have been causing some problems, so my self confident answer may not be correct. However, I’ve been able to work on my current project on my phone a lot, copying and pasting tabs when necessary, with some whitespace cleanup when I have access to a laptop. It’s been much easier to work on this project than usual, because of the mobile friendly site and server-side storage.

I still swear that four spaces worked as a tab most of the time, but I probably just didn’t understand Inform 7’s whitespace rules.

For instance: 4 spaces work when doing an “After giving…:” rule, but not when doing if statements. My guess is that Inform only requires tabs for if statements, and I just thought I was making tabs with 4 spaces.

Still, most of my if statements are fairly similar, so that’s why copying and pasting works.

Just a quick note: I was right, it’s just the if statements. And this can be circumvented by using the “begin” and “end” format. However, this does not allow the use of “otherwise”.

Unless you have nested blocks, the number of spaces or tabs is irrelevant. You can have 0, 4 or 85, mix and match, vary the amount on every line, or you can put everything on the same line.

Once you have a block inside a rule (if, while, repeat…) and want to use the colon-and-indentation style, you need to make a distinction between the blocks so you must use tabs.

If you use the begin…end style, whitespace becomes irrelevant again and you can use whatever indentation you like. And it does allow “otherwise” if you punctuate it correctly and follow the syntax (“if x is y begin; … otherwise; … end if.”)

Sorry to dig up this thread, but I was thinking a lot today about programming with Inform 7 on my iPad. Of course there is playfic and it works pretty nice, but it is not the same as a native iOS-app. Inform on the Mac is such a beautiful application and a pleasure to work with. So my simple question is, is or was there any kind of effort to bring Inform on any mobile platform? Someone mentiond Inform 7 for Andriod. Any infos on that?

Jens

Having discovered Playfic through this thread, I gave it a go on my iPad but I couldn’t figure out the tabs/spacing on it. In Chrome on my desktop at work (I’m a terrible employee some days, tbh) Ctrl+Alt+9 works. I couldn’t get the Parchment part of the site to work in IE, so I don’t know how tabbing on that would work.