A number of ideas and suggestions

Here are a few features I’d love to see in a future version. Apologies if this is not the right place to put these.

Editor:

  1. Jump to error: If I press the “run” button and my app doesn’t run because of an error, it would be quite helpful if the code view would jump to the location of the error (including switching tabs if necessary).

  2. Multiple levels of undo: Because I often make multiple levels of errors.

  3. Paste at cursor location: When I position my cursor on a blank line or at the end of a line, the “select / paste” pop-up doesn’t appear. Which means that to paste there, I have to double-tap, and my aim is not very good. It would be great to have a “paste” button on the keyboard, or some other workaround.

  4. Filter double-taps that bring up keyboard: Often I’m viewing my code w/o the onscreen keyboard. I see something I want to edit, and I double-tap to position the cursor. Instead, the first tap brings up the keyboard, and the second tap (if my location happened to be in the lower half of the screen) taps on a key on the keyboard, and inserts it into my code. Ugh. I make this error at least once an hour, and it seems I’m unable to retrain myself. Any chance this could be fixed, such as by ignoring keyboard taps that occurred before the keyboard was on the screen?

  5. Make double-dashes selectable by double-tap: If I double-tap a word, it becomes selected, and then I can easily drag to extend the selection. But if I start by double-tapping on a double-dash (such as at the beginning of a comment), it does not select. Thus, to delete a comment line, I have to double-tap a word, then drag the right side to the end AND drag the left side to the beginning, to include the double-dashes.

  6. Search: A basic search, or better yet a search-and-replace, would be very helpful.

  7. Number-scroller opt out: The color picker is awesome. However, the “select a number and drag to change the value” thing never works for me. If I try to use it, I drag to the number I want and then it changes just as I lift my finger. Worse, I’ll try to double-tap to select a number, and I’ll accidentally change it…and have no memory of what it used to be set to. If I could turn it off, so that numbers would be easily selectable for normal editing, I would.

Main screen:

  1. Project organization: I know you’re working on new options for managing multiple projects. In the meantime, it would be great if scrolling between projects had less “friction”. Currently, if I want to get to a project late in the list, each swipe takes me only two or three projects down the line. If I could give a nice energetic swipe and see them flipping rapidly past, I would be so happy.

Help:

  1. Window width of in-app help: In the help screens accessed with the “eye” button, some text isn’t readable as it extends off the right edge of the window. Example: in the pairs(table) definition, the line starting “This will iterate over…”

  2. More text in help: Longer explanations and more examples would be great in general. Some topics are good as is (the “Conditionals Overview” is wonderful) but others offer a little less information than what I seem to need.

  3. Example projects: More comments in the example projects would increase their value tremendously. Some are nicely commented (Hello Mesh), but some could use a lot more (Dungeon Roller) and some have well-commented areas (Anagram - the Touch tab) but others that are more lacking (Anagram - the Anagram tab). Even just a note as to what each variable is used for might help newbies like me to understand and learn from the code more readily.

Major feature:

  1. Audio: I’d love to be able to use bits of imported audio in my Codea apps. Even better, I’d like to be able to record audio from within the Codea app, and have the audio stored somewhere as a resource so I could use it in my apps. Even even better, I’d like to be able to record audio from within my apps, e.g. triggered and recorded by the user (example: “Record your name now [beeeep]” and then let me play their name back to them later).

Thanks for reading. Please don’t take any of this as criticism. I think Codea is amazing, both as a concept and in its execution, and the rate of improvements and additions is astounding.

+1 for frictionless project scrolling on the main page. I had been wanted to complaint about this but I kept forgetting it. Thank you.

Codea’s way of scrolling on the project list is indeed doesn’t seem to be the “correct” iOS way which is smooth and has inertia (frictionless). Codea’s way might be good in the beginning when the number of project is not much. But as soon as it got more projects, scrolling them becomes a pain as it requires more efforts. :frowning: Hope this will be fixed in the near future.

These are great basic suggestions. These are great things TLL should add as a side feature in each update. I’ve wa Ted these for a while. Adio would be great, but custom spritelack a first. Quick beta talk: TLL has a feature for importing images from a URL in the next version. It almost made it into 1.3.5. It allows spritepack images downloads from the web. Their plan is to also eventually allow other files too, like audio files and text files. Recording would be nice too.

Editor:

  1. This is planned, sorry it’s taking so long!
  2. Also planned, probably for later than 1. though
  3. is an absolutely fantastic suggestion — paste at cursor. I find it frustrating to use iOS paste as well.
  4. Noted, will look into this one
  5. Perhaps a comment/uncomment line is in order. A select line/line range feature is planned.
  6. Also planned. This will be integrated with the function browser.
  7. At the moment you have to touch-hold to activate a number scroller. This used to be an issue in older versions, are you using the latest?

Main Screen:

  1. I have been trying to get this working but it’s a little harder than it seems. Will revisit shortly. Agree that this would be ideal.

Help:

  1. If you could make a note of where these appear in the issue tracker (as you encounter them) it would be much appreciated.
  2. Apologies for this — Our help document is very hard to edit. Which then makes it quite hard for us to write useful documentation. I hope to rewrite the help system as a native UI tool rather than a web-based one.
  3. Good point. WIll have to take a stab at this soon.

Great feature request on Audio. You can actually play arbitrary PCM data — see the soundbuffer object. It’s pretty sketchy to actually get the data in at the moment, though.

If you could file your requests as individual issues/bugs on the tracker (https://bitbucket.org/TwoLivesLeft/codea/issues) that would be great.

Just a little trick that I’m not sure will help or not, if you bring up the magnifier and hover it where you want to type, keep holding and type and the text will be inserted. It helps if you want to insert numbers in variouse places. It would also be nice if you could look up a selected function in help.

@Simeon - It’s not hard to find the help file of a selected word. Just get the word and go to this URL: Codea.app/Reference/#detail/index/NameofFunctionLookup.
And of it’s not found, just redirect them to a page that says that the function isn’t found. But it’s not really that simple for a really good lookup.

  1. is one that I hit all the time. I can’t tell you how often I end up have to clean a () out of my code because tapping at the start of a line happens to align with the () button.

@simeon:

Main screen: ideal would be some sort of folder structure. This would be of some help with the current, not-so-ideal situaltion.

@gunnar_z - TLL is planning on having you tag all the projects and you can view the projects by their tabs.

some have well-commented areas (Anagram - the Touch tab) but others that are more lacking (Anagram - the Anagram tab)

I’m a bit haphazard with commenting. I know I ought to but it often gets done at a different time to writing the actual code and tends to go in waves. The older bits of code are therefore better commented than the newer bits. The Touch library is relatively old, the actual anagram part less so.

I hereby promise to do better!

Yay! 1.3.5 out! Now can we have some of these features n 1.4 or whatever please @Simeon?

I would like to ask@Simeon if there are any plans to include some functions to access location information? Ideally, I’d like to access the lat/long, ground track, ground speed and altitude from the GPS. Thanks!

Carlos

@CharlEcho - It’s in their long future plans. But I’m curiouse your plans with it… We don’t have map access… Yet… It might be usefull when we get sockets…

@Zoyt - I’m a pilot and I would like to write an app to give me what I call a poor man’s ILS which is to say an artificial way to give me and my airplane lateral and vertical guidance to a waypoint. Basically I would have a compass rose that would rotate based on the ground track and needles to show lateral and vertical deviations from a desired path. I hope long term isn’t too far out into the future…

Cheers,

Carlos

Hi Simeon,

First of all, Codea is a very, very nice program!

But, I have only two wishes:
1)
Is it possible to make a pop-up window with a message “are you sure?” when deleting a project or a class?

Is it possible to change the startup screen in such a way that project names are presented like Windows Explorer, adjustable inside the settings screen? - > existing layout → explorer layout.
In explorer layout you can see more projects at once and scrolling/ selection is than maybe easier. If it becomes an option, I want to pay for it.

Greetings, Dirk.nl

  1. Very possible. I was supposed to add this earlier but forgot to get around to it. If you (or anyone else) could add these to the issue tracker it would be much appreciated.
  2. We will put something in to make projects more manageable. Exactly what that is isn’t certain just yet.

Thank you for your feedback @hartland

@CharliEcho GPS is possible to add. We will keep it in mind in the next updates.

@Simeon - Thanks!!

Simeon, I was just thinking about the “run” button on the extended keyboard. If you hide the keyboard there another “run” button. Is it possible to use the “run” button on the extended keyboard for a “tab” to the left. (= deleting spaces with the same amount as you will insert with the “tab” key) If you select a block of code you can use this button to move the complete selected block one “tab” position to the left.
So, the most left “tab” key for moving text to the right and the most right “tab” to the left.
Maybe handy?

Running your program means hide the keyboard first.

Greetings, Dirk.nl

Thanks for your responses, Simeon.

“At the moment you have to touch-hold to activate a number scroller. This used to be an issue in older versions, are you using the latest?”

I studied my behavior and I see why I’m having this problem. I often touch-and-hold, either to bring up the “select/paste” menu at the insertion point, or to bring up the positioning-magnifier-bubble-thing. So if I want to change a number from, say, “125” to “135”, I’ll touch and hold so I can position my cursor just after the “2”.

I should probably try to teach myself, in the case of numbers at least, to start my touch-and-hold away from the number and then slide it over. I’d still prefer a way to turn it off, though.

I’ll enter the other issues in the tracker, as well as any help text margin issues I find. Thanks again for the great support!