The soft button needs work
This would be a five star app were it not for the soft back button. It is a necessary GUI element, but its execution breaks the app, or at least causes me to be constantly working around it.. First, there is no reason it should be so huge. Make it small! Second, it overlays the first lines of text. When coding, we must make space for the button or otherwise we create untouchable code at the beginning. When running programs, I often have no idea what they say on their first line because it is under that button.
Make the button small and move it out of the text area. If you need it huge, make the text screen begin under it. Something else that might be nice is an invisible ESC "area".
Make the button small and move it out of the text area. If you need it huge, make the text screen begin under it. Something else that might be nice is an invisible ESC "area".
Show more
Needs a few UI tweaks, and a mod to CR <-> LF mod.
Takes a few seconds to work out how to create a NEW BASIC file, but does what it says. Main niggles are: 1) the lack of any feature / means to convert Carriage Returns to Line Feeds and vice versa, in the editor, to permit code blocks to be pasted in from the Web, Apple's Note app, a text editor, ... . Limiting any copy-n-pastes to a single line. 2) No proper *HELP command, with the peculiarities documented, or even how to get back to the menu 3) No *Command to get back to the MENU (other than working out a press "<" (ESCAPE) icon to bring up a keyboard, and typing: CALL!-4, QUIT, *QUIT, *Q. to kill the emulator, then reloading). Pressing or holding the "<" icon, simply results in ESCAPE being displayed on screen, a new prompt, and the on-screen keyboard appearing 5) No warning its 64bit, so 8 / 16 bit BBC, or 26 / 32 bit Archimedes listings may need to be reworked, to cope with the new bigger types, say addresses needing to be stored in the new, double %%, big Integer type, eg. freeMem%% = HIMEM - LOWMEM
Show more
Response from developer
I can't reproduce this. I can copy-and-paste a code block from the Pages app or a web page into BBC BASIC, and line-breaks are preserved.
no voiceover support
inaccessible. £A11Y.
Amazing
Seeing is believing. I never thought I would see an app like this on my iPad. The videotext examples were particularly impressive.
Good port of BBC Basic with limitations
The BBC Basic implementation is very close to other versions created by this author. Unfortunately the main functions like displaying folders and files and editing etc. are very rudimentary. The virtual keyboard has no extensions for making editing easier.
I was not able to create folders and files either.
Overall a good start and look forward to future releases.
I was not able to create folders and files either.
Overall a good start and look forward to future releases.
Show more
Needs a few UI tweaks, and a mod to CR <-> LF mod.
Takes a few seconds to work out how to create a NEW BASIC file, but does what it says. Main niggle is the lack of any feature / means to convert Carriage Returns to Line Feeds and vice versa, to permit code blocks to be pasted in from the Web, Apple's Note app, a text editor, ... . Limiting any copy-n-pastes to a single line.
Show more
The majority of commands work perfectly
Generally this app is amazing. The only issue is ensuring you disable smart punctuation in the keyboard system setting on your iPad if the " character is playing up.
The best by far, but some idiosyncrasies
This is the most powerful implementation of Basic on iOS by miles. It's also completely free, with no ads; it doesn't harvest your data; and it doesn't even take up too much space on your device. You probably won't become a Silicon Valley billionaire writing BBC Basic, but there's no better way to (a) learn programming and (b) write useful programs of your own to do jobs you can't find an app for. There's lots of documentation online to help you get started with the BBC Basic language.
A few minor points to be aware of:
(1) The app itself takes a bit of getting used to. It isn't that the user interface is bad, but it's quite different from most other iOS apps.
(2) This is an implementation of the BBC Basic language, not a BBC Micro emulator. Old 1980s programs written in pure Basic will almost certainly run, although you might need to make some minor changes (e.g. a few COLOUR statements to get the palette looking the same) and they'll be much faster; but anything that relies on the particular processor or particular memory addresses definitely won't. Don't expect to be able to run commercial BBC Micro software!
(3) Other modern structured Basics are mostly derived from Microsoft's QBasic, but this one isn't. Straightforward differences of syntax won't cause anyone much trouble—it's easy to put ENDPROC instead of END SUB. But there are more subtle differences (parameters in BBC Basic are passed by value unless you specifically ask for pass by reference, local variables have dynamic scope instead of lexical scope, etc.) that won't always stop your programs running but can sometimes cause awkward bugs. So if you're used to a Microsoft-style Basic you should read up on how BBC Basic does things. (You don't need to worry about these issues at all if you're new to programming!)
A few minor points to be aware of:
(1) The app itself takes a bit of getting used to. It isn't that the user interface is bad, but it's quite different from most other iOS apps.
(2) This is an implementation of the BBC Basic language, not a BBC Micro emulator. Old 1980s programs written in pure Basic will almost certainly run, although you might need to make some minor changes (e.g. a few COLOUR statements to get the palette looking the same) and they'll be much faster; but anything that relies on the particular processor or particular memory addresses definitely won't. Don't expect to be able to run commercial BBC Micro software!
(3) Other modern structured Basics are mostly derived from Microsoft's QBasic, but this one isn't. Straightforward differences of syntax won't cause anyone much trouble—it's easy to put ENDPROC instead of END SUB. But there are more subtle differences (parameters in BBC Basic are passed by value unless you specifically ask for pass by reference, local variables have dynamic scope instead of lexical scope, etc.) that won't always stop your programs running but can sometimes cause awkward bugs. So if you're used to a Microsoft-style Basic you should read up on how BBC Basic does things. (You don't need to worry about these issues at all if you're new to programming!)
Show more
