@Simeon - just decided to tidy up my Codea system and the first thing I have tried is exporting files to an external drive. When run through the system ie the zip export, worked fine - but relatively slow (one file a time). So I tried using the fileapp and seemed to work, did so for all files in documents (is root) but seems regards all collections as a folder but can’t see the files inside.
Thought: could you make all collections as zip files,and possibly even the .Codea files too, so the is recognised them as zips and deals with them accordingly? Internally Codea could treat them as .Codea or collections.
Version 4 might change all this.
Second thought: the arrival of metal means anyone with metal based Mac can access Codea on the iPad much easier than older Mac kit. Does it enable on Mac editing.
Anticipating it does - our only alternative to that is Airdrop and the browser editing which works well but had few issues. Any chance this could be improved? I wondered if you could modify it to export and import files from established editors like Notepad+ or Visual Studio Code and not live editing. That may stop some of the issues.
Finaly I think I am a little naive when thinking about iOS and Codea under the hood, like does the iPad multitask or simply share memory and switch and how does Codea interact, flowchart sort of thing - mainly in series or graphics then touch sort of thing. Any documentation or literature you could point me to?
Codea will open any folder with a .codea extension. The zip import you mention was a way to bring files into Codea — but you could just as easily unzip them using the Files app and then tap on the .codea files to edit and run them using Codea
You can store .codea files anywhere on your iPad, and you can tap them in the Files app to edit them. That said, only the ones in the “On My iPad > Codea” folder will show up in the main project browser
Regarding Metal and macOS:
Codea 4.0 will have an entirely new renderer which uses Metal. This means it will run on macOS, and this includes the code editor. On macOS you will typically have .codea files on your hard drive that you double-click to open in Codea. You could use any text editor to open these files (e.g., drag-and-drop a .codea package onto Sublime Text, or VS Code, and it will just show you all the Lua files inside)
Not exactly sure what you mean with the last question. iPad apps are either active (visible on the screen) or suspended (closed). This is very different to Mac apps, because on the Mac when you minimise or put a window in the background, the application is still running. On iOS the application essentially gets “frozen” and no longer receives CPU time. If the application remains unused for a while on iOS it gets quit completely and the next time you open it, it runs from scratch
@RonJeffries - I had heard metal would allow iPad apps to run on the new generation of Mac’s. But, not on old Mac’s. That’s why I was hoping we could find another way of enabling a similar system with the old kit. Like Aircode and browsers. Could we have Codea running in a browser?