Codea Scratchpad

General
1

Hey everyone

Along with Codea 2.1, we also released Codea Scratchpad today. A completely free (but simplified) version of Codea.

Check it out here: http://codea.io/scratchpad

If you’ve ever wanted to share a project with a friend who doesn’t have Codea, now you can. It’s a very capable app that is tailored towards simple projects.

Edit:

The features missing from Codea Scratchpad are as follows

  • No Dropbox sync
  • No Air Code
  • No Xcode export
  • No Shader Lab
  • Single tab per project
  • No project dependencies
  • No project search/replace
  • Limited project browser options (no search, no settings)
  • No project asset packs
  • No plain text asset editor

I think there are a couple other differences, but those are the main ones.

2

Um… 1.) I don’t see much differcne between the two( downloaded it, but didn’t test it much. More just looked at it)
2.) I tested scratchpad has a faster drawing rate. Is this also true for Codea 2.1?

3

I’m still expecting Codea goes universal, available both for iPad and iPhone/iPod touch form factor. Any news about this, @simeon ? :slight_smile:

4

@bee the re-written project browser was a big first step.

5

@simeon: Alright then. One question about ScratchPad… can we share a multitab project from Codea into ScratchPad?

6

@bee If you long press and choose “Copy” on your project, you could probably paste it into a project in Codea Scratchpad (all in one tab)

7

What would be cool would for ScratchPad to have a preview mode where by I could ask a friend (or customer) to install the free ScratchPad (Universal) app and I could then email them a complete project which they would only be able to run - kind of like the way the AppCooker and AppTaster work.

8

@TechDojo agreed, though being able to run projects from email is unfortunately not allowed at this time.

9

@Simeon - how about a “share” via Dropbox, I export a project to my Dropbox, share it, you open it on your Dropbox with the “open in…” - would that be allowed?

10

@Simeon Codea ScratchPad is amazing! Now I can teach some people that wants to learn about Lua using Codea! Great job!

11

@Simeon @TechDojo Maybe you could take use of AirDrop?

12

Isn’t Codea Scratchpad a bit too good? I think that there should be a line limit for the code as well.

13

I just tried copying a project with 3900 lines (of which about half were hard-coded data) and it had a lot of trouble. I had to do it in steps, and even then it crashed a few times. The editor may not have an official line limit, but it sure struggles with a large number of them.

14

@Ceres what device are you on?

15

@Simeon I’m using an iPad 2, iOS 7.1.2

16

@Ceres - I believe this happens on Codea itself as well, on older devices. On the newer devices the iPad freezes for about half a minute, and then crashes or completes.

17

@Ceres @Saturn031000 Codea should be okay if you have a complex project in lots of tabs (ex. Cargo-Bot) but 3900 lines in a single file is quite a lot, I imagine the device could run out of ram in that scenario (due to the autocomplete and semantic analysis indexes built).

18

@Simeon and @Saturn031000 In the end I was able load the 3900 line project into Scratchpad successfully, but it did behave as @Saturn031000 described. It just took several tries with fragments that were no longer that a few hundred lines. In Codea the project is in about 10 tabs, one quite large and the others more reasonable.

This has prompted me to do some cleaning up of the code, removing quite a bit of dead wood!

19

It would be beautiful if Scratchpad was iPhone compatible, so we could work on smaller things while on the go, and then transfer to the main codea project.

A little wishful thinking.

20

@Simeon - would it be possible to put some kind of Java style @Annonation or C style #pragma to disable autocomplete etc - I realise 3900 lines might be excessive, but if your app has several different data files then it might reach that limit fairly easily.

Update : Hmm thinking about it - I suppose the new text asset feature and JSON format files might be a better choice, FWIW - there are a few good JSON parsers on the forum only a search click away.