Today, TUAW posted some potentially good news for programming dilettantes interested in writing iPhone apps. Quite some time ago (1993), a small Canadian firm called NS Basic came out with a development kit based on BASIC that was easy to understand and use. Since then, George Henne and the NS Basic crew have kept up with the handheld world by creating dev tools for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and (soon) Symbian, as well as providing the only remaining Newton development tool.

The interesting news for iPhone developers is that NSBasic recently posted a video on their website that shows a small “Hello, World!” app and a stock quote application running on an iPhone. They’re using NS Basic/Palm to write the applications and then running them in the experimental StyleTap Platform for iPhone and iPod Touch. While the apps look remarkably like Palm OS apps, it’s exciting to see an easy and powerful set of dev tools that even beginners could use to write iPhone apps.

NS Basic is not a shipping product, nor do they have plans to port NS Basic to iPhone. But as TUAW suggests, perhaps interest in the video will convince them of the viability of the iPhone / iPod Touch market…