'Codify' Brings Touch Based Programming to iPad

[macsmurf]

It would be fun to program on the iPad but unfortunately I use tools such as the terminal and git and although both can already be run on a jailbroken iDevice, Apple probably won't allow access to the terminal ever.

...but it's definitely a cute app.

 

[mj-macrumors]

possible to ex and import files

its possible to copy files from and to the ipad with http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

and dont need to jailbreak it ...

 

[RedTomato]

I can sling files back and forth from my iPhone (not jb) quite easily. There are many apps that transfer files via a Mac or PC program handshaking with the iOS app. It should be quite easy to do it for this app.

Examples: Stanza (books & PDF), Dropbox, photo utilities, email attachments, various Office / graphics utilities.

With this app, I should be able to create a program or something, then send it out as an email attachment, or even save it as a xxcodexx.jpg 'photo' or other accepted file then unpack it on the Mac or PC

I'm not an expert - what am I getting wrong here?

 

[KnightWRX]

I'd hate to see you about 15-20 years ago when we were still programming from a shell with no autocomplete, popup menus to choose functions, no mouse support let alone touch all on a 14" CRT.

Kids are too spoiled nowadays.

But we had physical keyboards and Curses based IDEs.

Try doing it on line editors 30 years ago.

I wonder if someone makes a XCode theme that can make it look like the Borland stuff. Best color high-lighting I've seen yet (or maybe since I learned on it, It's just easier on my eyes...).

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It would be fun to program on the iPad

I doubt it would be. Heck, I hardly find it fun typing a URL unto my TouchPad (and it's frankly the same on an iPad).

 

[christian_k]

Until you can.

Just the other day there were people around here bleating that the iPad isn't for content creation and that it can't be done on the iPad.

Then we're shown how to do it a matter of days later. What's next?

More perspective on the Post-PC Era.

Of course, this is not a technical problem, it is he result of Apples strict policies.
There are tools available on the Android platform that let you code and create Apps that are ready for the market. Its even possible on a phone.

Remember Psion PDAs? These allowed you to code on device more than a decade ago, featuring a BASIC like language preinstalled from the factory. And they even allowed you to do with your code what you liked...

Christian

 

[57004]

The Apple II maxed out at 48KB. Making anything run there required all sorts of Woznikian hacks.

Not really. 48kB was plenty at the time.

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But we had physical keyboards and Curses based IDEs.

Try doing it on line editors 30 years ago.

I wonder if someone makes a XCode theme that can make it look like the Borland stuff. Best color high-lighting I've seen yet (or maybe since I learned on it, It's just easier on my eyes...).

There's also borland-style text-based IDEs available that work in xterm. Like Rhide. I've used those for a while in the early Linux days.

I was never crazy about the blue background anyway I think the xterm colours are better for these days.

 

[mdelvecchio]

I noticed they refrained from showing the "keyboard". I can't imagine typing sufficiently quickly and accurately on the iPad for extended periods of time. I think this is one of those cases of "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Still good on TLL for pushing the envelope.

why wouldn't you be using an external physical keyboard?

 

[dugbee]

Seeing those Borland screens reminds me of the giant box I got as an upgrade to Turbo Pascal. It had all the Turbo products (C, Pascal, Assembler, Debugger, etc) - but also came with full printed programming guides and reference books. Those were the good old days.

 

[Amazing Iceman]

Since you can't get your creations off the device I guess this'll be great for casual programming, but the actual stuff will still be done on computers

Mmmm.. I wonder if you could somehow copy and paste the source code, or use tools like Phone Explorer to extract the file and distribute it.

$7.99 for what seems more like a toy than a real productivity tool is kind of expensive. I'll keep an eye on reviews. Sounds interesting for casual hybrid programming.

 

[GorgonPhone]

can you say "jailbreak"...lolololol

 

[firewood]

Taking away the ability to program a computer is NOT a step forward.

You can program an iPad in Codify... or even Basic (et.al.). You just can't download or import programs from elsewhere.

And you can write or download and run Javascript on an iPad as much as you want. This is explicitly allowed in the the App store rules.

 

[cajun67]

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I learned coding by screwing around with Applesoft BASIC to see what I could do. Also, the computer magazines of the day frequently distributed programs by printing the code on their pages, and their users would type them in. Those programs frequently had major bugs in them, so you had to troubleshoot the code.

The Mac came out, and while I saw that the machine would be a huge paradigm shift for the industry, Jobs did not want to include any sort of programming language. Microsoft sold a BASIC compiler for the Mac, but it wasn't cheap.

Then Apple took a pet project of one of its developers and included it for free on every Mac. That project was called Hypercard. Suddenly, everyone had access to a programming tool on their Macs (though a relative few really understood it). HC was never a profit center for the Mac, but in my mind, it brought tremendous value. Once again, I was writing apps to fill in the gaps for software that was not available commercially. I remember in college, I was taking a foreign language, and I wrote a stack that would quiz me on the vocabulary. I even inserted the Macintalk extension into the stack, and it would correctly pronounce the words for me; I know it sounds pretty mundane these days, but a couple of decades ago it was fairly groundbreaking stuff.

And even in the pre-internet days, I could still hit the BBS's to find stacks that I needed. Games, utilities, home finance, recipies, whatever.

Then Apple killed HC. They stopped development of it for years, and when they grew tired of listening to HC's fans begging for an upgrade, Apple made it a shrink-wrapped upgrade only; no more free HC. Worse, the upgrade sucked; it didn't begin to compare to a competing product called SuperCard. Selling a shrink-wrapped upgrade to HC pretty much killed it.

Personally, I think it would be tremendous if Apple would buy a package like Codify and bundle it on all iPads. Not only would it be a great learning tool for kids, but they could create a section of the App Store just for distributing user content.

 

[alandail]

You can program an iPad in Codify... or even Basic (et.al.). You just can't download or import programs from elsewhere.

And you can write or download and run Javascript on an iPad as much as you want. This is explicitly allowed in the the App store rules.

I was referring to the post that said the restrictions of the app store are a step forward. I understand Codify is programming the iPad. According to the article, this was a recent change in the restrictions on apps, although apparently basic was allowed before the change to lift the restrictions on interpreters.

I understand there are security issues, but baring moving code in and out of the app is overly restrictive. There needs to be a way to build the needed security into the programming environment while allowing programming.

Currently something like hypercard for the iPad is not feasible. You can't more your code to your other devices, you can't share it with others. Sure, professional programmers can do more programming in objective-c than hypercard, but don't underestimate the potential of having more accessible programming tools. The best selling computer game of the 90s, Myst, was originally written with Hypercard.

It's also not currently feasible to build a system for students to learn programming on the iPad because it's against the terms to allow those students to submit those projects to their teacher or for the teacher to provide prebuilt starting projects for their kids.

 

[subsonix]

This is beautifully executed, well done. Is there any way to get the LUA scripts of the device?

 

[kingtj]

Except ....

You act like Apple has no underlying, valid reason to do this and it's purely a whim on their part? In reality, I can see a VERY good reason to be cautious about approving these apps.

In the Windows PC world, MANY businesses are enduring long-term problems caused by a critical application being developed for them using one of these high-level interpreted programming languages. Then, years down the road, the app needs a lot of modification to handle changes in the environment. (For example, maybe they moved from multi-part forms printed on a dot-matrix printer to printing multiple copies on plain paper from a fast laser printer? Or maybe they want to upgrade the whole environment to a newer operating system, but the interpreted language only works on an older one?)

When these things happen, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate software developers willing and able to make the changes required and the cost to do so goes through the roof. What initially seemed like a great "shortcut" to get the application built quickly and easily winds up being a lasting nightmare.

The truth is, serious applications intended to be used for any length of time should really only be coded in industry standard programming languages liable to be around for years to come. If you program an app using a version of C or C++, I can almost guarantee future platforms and operating systems will still be able to compile that source code with only relatively minor changes, even decades later. Programmers will be around who are familiar working with it too. A relatively obscure, limited purpose app like this "Codify" though? Most likely you're stuck if its developers decide to quit updating/supporting it and apps made in it go to waste if you should ever need to run them on devices other than iPads.

Hmmm, once again apple limits the potential of their own devices, not because of any technical or hardware limitations, but because... They feel like it.

Always makes me kinda sad... I mean, how awesome could touch based programming be?! But for $8 there's not much point in trying this app for me, because I can't really do much with the fruits of my labours...

I keep waiting for the day when the iPad and iPhone will be released from artificial limitations... Perhaps one day it will happen... It's gradually getting there. You don't need a computer to activate an iPad or iPhone anymore... But you can still only sync it to one computer!

Someday...

 

[madmax316]

Develop on the device...

There is no substitue for developing on the target hardware... And, to be honest even a seasoned programmer can have trouble picking up XCode and ObjC...

We introduced a similar product a few months ago, and Apple approved it on our first stab. I however understand their concerns about security and protecting their revenu stream however...




David
www.ivbasic.com

 

[lilo777]

Until you can.

Just the other day there were people around here bleating that the iPad isn't for content creation and that it can't be done on the iPad.

Then we're shown how to do it a matter of days later. What's next?

More perspective on the Post-PC Era.

Apparently you still don't have a clue about Apple. Allowing sharing (and thus distribution) of the code would allow people to bypass App Store. If this were to happen Apple would shut this application altogether. Your best hope for the tool like this is Android (what else is new).

 

[subsonix]

Apparently you still don't have a clue about Apple. Allowing sharing (and thus distribution) of the code would allow people to bypass App Store. If this were to happen Apple would shut this application altogether. Your best hope for the tool like this is Android (what else is new).

It would be enough if you could get the scripts and resources to and from the device, either to a computer or to iCloud. Personally I don't see the appeal in sharing across iPads directly.

 

[junkster]

Less impressive than I first thought

It's a Lua IDE with some nice hooks for graphics and sound. But the core programming experience is still typing textual Lua code into an editor.

It's not a game development kit or a visual language or anything particularly modern (other than running on an iPad). It's not something you'd be able to use if you can't program.

 

[lucidmedia]

It's a Lua IDE with some nice hooks for graphics and sound. But the core programming experience is still typing textual Lua code into an editor.

Exactly. While I very much appreciate the attempt, I could be curious to see someone rethinking programming within a touch-based context... some more graphical languages have been mentioned already.

oh, and I am still disappointed in Apple at not allowing Scratch onto the device.

 

[FloatingBones]

In this context it means that there are no objective rules or technical reasons one can use to predetermine whether an app is acceptable to Apple.

That's the disconnect. The rules about intermediate languages are quite clear.

The rules change on a case by case and pragmatic basis.

Examples?

There is no hardware or software reason why the iPad could not be used for programming. It can't because Apple says so.

I've never seen where Apple has said that. Do you have a reference?

I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but it is artificial.

If you think this is a real restriction, you need to provide a reference.

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Not really. 48kB was plenty at the time.

48KB was sufficient on the Apple II because of things like self-modifying code.

Today, there is no need for such hacks. A secure operating environment is a much higher priority.

 

[madmaxmedia]

This seems like a nice app perhaps for someone relatively new to programming to do some prototyping of iOS apps?