BBC BASIC
Development >> iOS >> iOS edition updated to build 0006
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iOS edition updated to build 0006
Post by Richard Russell on Mar 19th, 2018, 1:33pm

I've updated 'BBC BASIC for iOS' to build 0006. The main change in this release is that it now supports a 'custom URL scheme'. What this means is that you can run BBC BASIC and tell it automatically to launch a specified program; this is similar to the capability of the Android edition which allows shortcuts to BBC BASIC programs to be placed on the home screen.

Unfortunately (as is so often the case) Apple don't make things as straightforward as they are in Android! The only way of running BBC BASIC with a program-name parameter is via a special URL that Safari can handle. In this case the URL takes the following form:

Code:
      bbcbasic://program.bbc

Assuming BBC BASIC is not already running (unfortunately neither iOS nor Android currently supports multiple instances of the same app) this will run BBC BASIC and immediately launch 'program.bbc' in the @usr$ directory.

You can manually activate this feature by typing a URL of that form into Safari, but its real power comes from the ability to automate this process. In principle (and once upon a time in practice) this allows you to create a home-screen shortcut to run a BBC BASIC program of your choosing, but Apple (in their infinite wisdom) seem to have decided that this is not a good idea and have blocked Safari's ability to create a shortcut when it leads to a custom URL scheme. You can create a Bookmark however.

Nevertheless, with some effort, it should still be possible to create a home screen shortcut to a 'web app' which itself activates the BBC BASIC URL. I've not succeeded in doing this myself because I'm not an HTML expert, but if somebody does so I would be very interested to learn the details.

Richard.