While on the plane to Boston, I got a little frustrated that I can’t program my iPhone directly. No simple, scriptable terminal or anything. Since I’m not of the skill or inclination to quickly write a python interpreter or processing development environment as an app for the phone, I went a different route. I decided to use the icons on the home screen as a low-resolution display matrix.
When adding a page to your homescreen, the iPhone creates an icon for the page by rendering the whole thing down to a square format. I took advantage of this to create half-filled dots on the screen.
Naturally, I had to write something with the pixels I was making. It being party time and all, I decided to encourage celebratory behavior with my downsampled display. Keeping with the spirit of lo-res, here is a video of the display in action, converted into an animated gif.
In the end, I rather like the simple visual weight of the 50/50 webpages: 01v 01h 10v and 10h. They are flexible minimalist works; they scale to fit any size real-estate. Use them to create your own iPhone cum lite-brite or just enjoy your monitor’s ability to crank out pretty, high-contrast black and white pixels.
