Codea for OS X

Suggestions
1

This might be a bad idea. Fair warning.

It just occurred to me that I could grab the runtime, paste in a project, monkey with Xcode, get frustrated when it didn’t work right, ask for help, and spin on that for a while, and maybe eventually have my Codea project running under the emulator on my mac. Maybe. I don’t really have a plan to put anything in the app store - maybe someday - I just want to write and test code for Codea where I can easily cut and paste and so on.

You know, I’d rather just pay TLL another 8 bucks (or such - I’m notoriously cheap) and download it from the App Store. Run an app, it lets me select iphone/ipad/fullscreen-mac, retina/non-retina, a directory - and runs it. In an ideal world, it might let me package that up for the mac as it’s own standalone app. But either way, I don’t muck about with Xcode, and I can use whatever editors and source control I want to use to develop apps for the ipad.

It seems to me this wouldn’t be super hard - a big part of Codea on the ipad is the editor, and you can simply ignore that portion on the mac. The libraries should simply recompile - the only issue would be changing any iOS-Specific library calls to OS X ones, and perhaps some shenanigans with having mouse clicks show as touches, and maybe allowing the touch pad to map in some way to the screen. Other than things that map directly to the ipad/iphone, I’m not really interested in mac-specific stuff - I’m thinking about this purely as an ipad development environment, plus a casual way to play with Codea apps that suit.

I know we talked about this before, but that was before the runtime had been shared, and TLL was busy with other features. If you’re bored waiting for Apple to approve 1.4 - maybe this might be fun. :slight_smile:

2

+1.
I want it too.
And a coder too.

3

We’d like to port the runtime to Mac OS X. I had hoped to release it as OS X compatible but wasn’t able to do so.

There’s some fairly tricky parts. Text rendering, for example, makes use of UIKit and iOS CoreAnimation to render UI elements into textures.

4

Well… what we actually need is Codea Play for OS X. Bring a project from iPad to OS X (through iCloud?) and run it. Want to edit the source, it would fires up another app (TextEdit? or anything given in setting). That would be enough. :slight_smile:

5

@bee that’s the part with the tricky parts — Codea’s text() function, which renders a string, uses iOS UIKit stuff to generate the texture maps. We can re-write this for OS X though.

6

+1