I know there was a mention of a player app for the iPhone, but what about a Codea player as a (hopefully free) app for the iPad? Would make it much easier to share Codea projects with friends, and should build demand for the full version.
Yes, my intention was for it to be universal.
However now that I suspect that code importing is skirting Apple’s rules, a free app that did nothing but code importing would certainly highlight the feature.
That’s the beauty of a player app – it’s not loading code, it’s loading a project. In the same way that the Atari player allows people to load up dozens of old Atari games.
As long as the player is sandboxed so that it can’t launch other apps or touch files outside the Codea space, that looks to me as if it fits within the agreement.
I thought the Atari player had those games built in and you simply unlocked them, rather than downloading remote code to be executed on device.
I just spent $0.99 to be sure. If you pick a game (I picked Warlords) it downloads the game to you. In this case, the download was 5.1mb which seems like a lot for a game that fit on a couple of 8k ROMs.
So it certainly appears to download code executable by the emulator app.
The atari app does an in-app purchase of the games, which are then downloaded either as a batch, or on-demand. But I’ll bet any amount of money that the app was approved with the games, which are downloaded from Apple; with codea, the download woudn’t be from apple.
It would be very strange, to me, if Apple approves Codea - but won’t approve what is basically the same app, with less features. I mean - if you took Codea, killed the editor, made it universal - that’s the player.
I dunno - the whole Apple “we don’t want you to run your own code” thing is all very doublethink. The position doesn’t make logical sense - it contradicts itself in places. Sigh - what it really is is “No Flash”, but they can’t (couldn’t) just say that outright. Now that flash for mobile is dead in general, I am hoping we can all do what manly-men do, and forget there ever was the restriction. 
Possibly the name “interactive animation” would be a good term
Looking forward to it! (hint hint). Sounds awesome!
Well, Codea Player with all respect is not such a great idea. Let me explain… the main reason why Apple don’t want Flash on iOS (behind all mutual offenses) is that developers limited by what native features player supports. Let’s say new API to “some cool hardware feature” is appeared, no fruit for you before support will be added in this player.
Have a Player also means that we will have a build process (to have a native app), build process means than you need a Mac tool or lets say plugin to Xcode to edit code, verify code, because definitly Xcode will not do it with Lua source files. May be we can use Codea on device for this and after that have a steps to import code in IDE with “some static library” (there is no custom dynamic library support on device for you), but why bother- Obj-C and Apple frameworks are good enough.
Another question is performance. We will always blame player for this especially when do some serious commercial dev.
Codea is great for quick exploring ideas, fast prototyping, I personally think, the greatest tool in App Store for now.
But for serious staff you need access to “meat”.
@pelegrin - Yes, Codea was made to prototype, so we might want to share our app with others that are working with you. But your reasoning is logical…
I think without .codea import, the player is dead in the water. The whole point was to allow people to see/use codea projects without having to own codea. With cut and paste being the only way to import code, clearly that can’t happen.
Hmm… What about an HTML 5 Lua enterpeter? We load up some code somewhere and then someone else would go to that URL… I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but capturing video will do for now…
I’ll say it again. JavaScript is your friend.
The problem with an HTML 5 Lua interpreter for Codea, is performance. HTML 5 Canvas performance is a lot slower than the OpenGL engine TTL implemented in Codea. From a technical perspective, though, I wouldn’t mind JS & HTML 5 Canvas as a game prototyping engine. It just wouldn’t be performant, and it wouldn’t be Codea
@DreadPiratePJ - First of all, interesting name. Second of all, apple did include the ability to have a much faster JavaScript. If we could do this, we could even share it with android!
Even apple’s “faster javascript” (the JIT version in mobile safari) isn’t all that fast.
When I was benchmarking for my battle! JS thing, I was getting 300+ FPS on a desktop box, and less than 10 on my ipad. I expect in Codea/Lua I could get performance (especially with 1.3) similar to the desktop.
Reviving a very old topic, is there any status update on Codea Player? The Ludum Dare coming up made me think again about how nice it would be to be able to easily share Codea creations.
@Simeon - If I were to make an app similar to Codea Player and happened to get it past Apple, would I need special permission from you to release it on the App Store? The basic functionality I would include would be the ability to run code off the clipboard and store projects for later running. It would also be free.
Thanks!
@Zoyt Anything that could potentially damage Codea’s sales is most likely a no go for TLL, it wouldn’t be hard to hack around something like that to use the Codea player to run code you make. If the clipboard were the case I could edit my code in a notepad app or something similar then just copy and paste in to Codea player to run it, I think it’s quite difficult to get around this unless it is securely downloaded files.
@Luatee - Itd basically be Codea Player and completely promotes Codea, but it would also be useful for development.