Up to now I’ve used Codea to write the kind of simple game I wrote on my Spectrum in my youth. But Processing, which Codea is inspired by, is widely used to create beautiful data visualisations. Processing has lots of ways of getting data into an app. I was wondering what the plans are on this front for Codea, giving apps access to more than touch and the accelerometer.
Some ideas:
+1 for camera and location input. I’m an artist and I would LOVE using Codea to produce data visualizations!
I’ve asked for camera support before, and they didn’t go “HA HA NEVER!”, so I have high hopes. Microphone would also be a fun thing to play with.
Really - what I’d like to ask for is API pass-thru to all of that stuff. Access to the the photo roll and/or itunes music would be a bonus as well.
We’ve also asked for (and had favorable responses to) generic socket support, so http and all that jazz is easy enough to implement on top of that. You give me sockets and a week, and I’ll give you http. (https… well, it’d be nice to have library support - openssl and zlib would keep me busy for starters…)
I’d also like to reiterate support for images and blitting - the camera isn’t exciting until I can do things to it (overlay, or warp) and display the results.
I did a “photobooth” application a while back for a project of my wife’s - Implemented it as a custom addon for Quartz Composer on the mac. Seems to me we’re not far from that on the ipad2 if we could get to the camera…
How about if we expose the glsl shaders to Codea? This combined with an Image class would allow you to do interesting vertex and fragment shader effects.
Hee hee - Do it! I’d love to do some shader coding - been playing with it with webgl, and we could end up with some wicked effects without an insane performance hit. I didn’t ask because I wasn’t even aware you could do shader coding on the OpenGL on the ipad (I thought it was a 2.0 variant…)
OpenGL ES 2.0 has no fixed function pipeline and so requires everything use shaders. It wouldn’t be hard to fit into the existing framework.
We plan to have a proper image class in before this, however. And the Codea editor requirements brought about by a shader type class need to be considered.
A proper image class is my big want. GLSL programming would fall into the “cool fun” category for me, ie. I don’t expect it at all - but if you do it, wow! 