I love Codea - it’s my main development environment now - but, unfortunately, it’s really only suitable for games and simulations, not GUI apps. If I need a text field, a table view, or even a smooth pinch gesture, I’m forced to switch my coding to my desktop. I understand it would be a huge undertaking to wrap Cocoa in a lua API, especially given Codea’s current OpenGl foundations, but it would enable Codea to make the leap from “really cool toy” to “really cool development environment”.
Have looked at Cider?
Cider’s fantastic if you’re making a game, where there’s an expectation of a nonstandard UI, but to develop real-world iOS apps you need the native GUI IMHO.
.@SelectricSimian I have thought about designing a UI layer for Codea that uses native UIKit, however it’s still just a thought — there is no way I would want to simply wrap Cocoa Touch directly. I think the API is far too wordy and obtuse to be typed on an iPad, and it doesn’t fit with Codea’s design philosophy. If it does happen it would be a lesser-featured but much more Codea-like interpretation of UIKit.
@Simeon, I think you’re absolutely right - a subset of the UIKit that supports simple iOS-esque text entry, confirmation dialog boxes etc would satisfy a lot of people who want to make their Apps more iOS-like ( I think Pythonista has some limited support for these) - but obviously, this shouldn’t be the main priority of what’s on your to-do list. I think Cider is a great compromise btw.
i struggle with this, too - I have a simple database app that I want to write, but writing it in a GUI based tool just doesn’t “feel right”. I’m forced (due to my lack of Objective-C) to use MonoTouch - and as such, I have avoided writing this app because I really like Codea’s simplicity.
Being able to use simple/base controls (textbox, selectors, etc) might be a nice compromise in the future. Pinch/zoom, etc., would be too much.
@Simeon, I am a total Codea newby. I have been wondering around the functional programming space and bumped into “TreeSheets” which uses “wxWidgets” to gain cross platform GUI. So I follow the google trail to “wxLua”: http://wxlua.sourceforge.net/. Is this a library that could possibly be included in some way into Codea? My, vague understanding, understands that it could be compiled by xCode into a static library that may just get through the iPad app approval police…
Whoops, looks like I missed the scrumpy Cider
No, reading the github code, it looks very “procedural” rather than “functional”. But, what do I know?
@SelectricSimian Everything you state is possible in Codea, I’ve yet to find something that’s impossible (unless it gets too slow). Pinch and zoom, table view, text fields have all been done in Codea to what would be a cocos2D standard.