Hi, does codea support Coding for Iwatch?
Not yet, sadly… Maybe in the future, but for now it’s only iPhone and iPad.
That is actually a very interesting question! I guess it must be a flavour of iOS - but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple put some sort of restrictions and/or require an additional subscription fee via their developer programme to allow you to develop for this device.
Would be interested to know a bit more about this as well…
The chances of Codea supporting the Apple Watch are much less than slim. In other words, they will probably never to it. @andymac3d - Yup, those restrictions are there. And they’re insane, but the concept behind them is interesting.
The Apple Watch works completely differently than an iPhone. Here is how I explain it in one sentence: In an MVC model, the views (V) are on the watch and the model and controller (M & C) are on the iPhone.
So what happens is the watch talks to the iPhone and requests the UI for an app. It returns the views it should display and callbacks for them. Then, when an action on the watch is triggered, it tells the device that it was triggered and requests a new set of views.
This is very limiting to many apps because you can’t create things like games or custom views. A set of very basic views are provided to you and the only way to control the views on the device is when the watch asks for a new set of views.
So why does Apple do this? To conserve battery power and minimize memory needed on the watch. In my opinion, I believe that this was a very logical choice, yet it is very restricting. It’d be nice to have a lot more UI elements and more ways to control the watch app.
To sum that up, it would be very illogical and impossible (since Codea requires a GL frame) for Codea to work with the Apple Watch.
Hope that helps,
Nathan
EDIT: I forgot to mention that in Apple’s PR statement, they noted that in mid-2015, they’d be releasing a fully native API to run watch specific apps on the device. That means that you will not need an iPhone to run Apple Watch apps.
@simeon is this something you will try to add in the future? Or is it impossible?
@llEmill - I assume you want to work with the Apple Watch like you do on the Codea canvas, so that’s impossible. Period. And I don’t see why @Simeon would implement ability to interface with the UI.
It’s not impossible, but it’s like @Zoyt says. You could use Codea to generate static images which could then be displayed on the watch. But it’s a pretty heavy-weight way to do such a thing.
@Simeon @llEmill - @frosty developed a nifty library I might as well mention on the forums that I really like: (Flipbook)[ https://github.com/frosty/Flipbook]
It’d be super easy to implement as a plugin to Codea, if you really wan to.
Thanks,
Nathan