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I was wondering yesterday if an AI could help me conquer something I had considered to difficult to bother with, namely creating a mobile-phone app. I had once ages ago played with Xcode on my laptop, leanrng not only would I have to struggle with the UI but learn Swift to boot, plus Xcode, so...neah. Best left to specialists.
This article describes an experiment in AI creation of an HTML5 prototype and then a mobile-phone app, based on an educational MATLAB Live Script. The example target script is Two-dimensional Newton Cradles, a fun Live Script for physics students by the author. (You can check out my other scripts at File Exchange here.) The target script involves some nontrivial collisional dynamics but uses no specialized functions. The objective was to create a mobile phone app that allows the user to exercise interactive controls similar to the slider controls in the Live Script but in an interactive mobile-phone-deployed simulation. How did this experiment go? A personal best!!
Using the AI setup described in A universal agentic AI for your laptop and beyond, Claude AI was directed to first study the Live Script and then to invent an HTML5 prototype as described in Double Pendulum Chaos Explorer: From HTML5 Prototype to MATLAB interactive application with AI. (All in one prompt.) Claude was then directed to convert the HTML5 to Swift in a project structure and to operate Xcode to generate an iOS app. The use of Claude (Anthropic) and iOS (APPLE) does not constitute endorsement of these products. Similar results are possible with other AIs and operating systems.
Here is the HTML5 version in a browser:
The HTML5 creation was the most lengthy part of the process. (Actually, documenting this is the most lengthy part!) The AI made an initial guess as to what interactive controls to support. I had to test the HTML5 product and say a few things like "You know, I want to include controls for the number of pendulums and for the pendulum lattice shape and size too, OK?"
When the HTML5 seemed good, I asked for suggestions for how best to fit that to a tiny mobile phone display screen and make some selections of options provided. I was sweating at that point, thinking "This is not going to go well..." Actually, I had already done a quick experiment to build a very simple app to put Particle Data Group information into an app and that went swimmingly well. The PDG had already tried submitting such an app to APPLE and been dismissed as trying to publish a book so I wasn't going to pursue it. But THAT app just had to display some data, not calculate anything.
It did go well. There was one readily fixed error in the build, then voila. I added some tweaks including an information page. Here is the iPhone app in the simulator.
The File Exchange package Live Script to Mobile-Phone App Conversion with AI contains: 1) the HTML5 prototype which may be compared to the original Live Script, 2) a livescript-2-ios-skill that may be imported into any AI to assist in replicating the process, and 3) related media files. Have fun out there! Bear with me as I sort out what zip uploads are permitted there. It seems a zip folder structure is not!
