“That would make your code completely unsharable” - I think you misunderstand the usage intended…
I’d like to make an app that draws holiday decorations, and plays random music from my library that’s tagged “Holiday” as the genre.
I’d like to make a “name that tune” app, where you bid on “I can name that tune in N seconds”, then the bid winner hears N seconds at random from a song, and has to pick it from a list.
I want to make an app that makes a pie chart of music type by genre/stars/year, then I can tap on a wedge and it plays songs from that category.
I saw an app (don’t recall the name) where the library was displayed as a solar system - planets represented artists, moons their albums, and you could zoom about listening to different music. Was trippy.
Get ready for this - Exercises for the advanced user: I’d like to make an app that makes a playlist based on grabbing each song and analyzing it for sonic features (tempo, instrument types, etc). (This would clearly indicate being able to not just start/stop/play and query stuff, but actually getting to the song data). Or perhaps one that fingerprints the song data, and does an online lookup, setting metadata for that song if a match is found. (I actually think there’s an app out there that does that maybe?)
Heck - I want to say “If the user has “eye of the tiger”, play it, otherwise play the cheesy ABC version I grabbed…”
On camera - the construction seems odd to me, but what the heck - so long as I can wrap it up in “takeapicture()” and then muck about with an image, I’m a happy camper.
The camera construction would be like that so you can view a live stream from the camera on the screen. I’m happy to hear alternative suggestions.
Right, @Bortels, but your code could also break if your music library was changed. However, I do think it is a useful feature. Something we can definitely look at adding after some of the higher priority features.
I like @Bortels idea for the music, but that’s not the way I meant it. #15 was so you could open media files in Codea and use them. For instance, if I had a music file in my file storage application, Phone Drive, I could say “Open In Codea”. Then, you could say something like playMusic("file_opened_in_codea").
About the camera, I get what @Simeon is talking about the camera. It would be much faster. But you should make sure that you can then capture the image and save it to the photo album, project storage, or variable that can be drawn. By the way, because iOS is not PNG friendly, make sure to add the ability to set the transparent color when importing a sprite (when that feature comes).
To eliminate the confusion, I changed #15 to this: “Add the ability to see all the files that the user saves and files that you will add to the project data using the Open In feature or iTunes file sharing. The data will be filtered into file types. This one needs a mockup badly. Mockup coming soon Basically make it so you can open files like MP3s, ACC, or WAV in Codea so you can play music.” @Simeon- “We will probably add GPS and Gyro data first.” That sounds cool. I would use the data for possibly a device info app. I really don’t know, but use for the heck of it. At least add the option to know if the is cellular of wifi data available.
22. Add BlueTooth support. This one would be fun to play with… Add BlueTooth data exchange ability. Something like the app Basic! deals with it. You might want to take some other command ideas from this app. It’s quite an interesting app. Just for the heck of it, I uncompressed the app and took the help files. It’s right here if you want to take a look at it.
"The camera construction would be like that so you can view a live stream from the camera on the screen. " <— SWOON
That would be teh awesome.
“but your code could also break if your music library was changed” - My code never breaks. No, really, presumably this is based on loading the index of music each run… nothing library-wise would be hardcoded. Slow? Probably. Maybe. But I used to play games stored on cassette tapes, slow is no stranger to me…
“But I used to play games stored on cassette tapes, slow is no stranger to me…”
Time shared terminal using paper punched tape was my first experience. Typos were a pain, but the little dots were so much fun to raise havoc with. Ahhh, the memories…
Time shared terminal using paper punched tape was my first experience.
Ah, happy days …
Actually, a bit before my time but we had reams of it in the attic and I used to make Christmas decorations out of it. So an “app-t” reminder at this time of year.
22 - we had a discussion about it on another thread. I’m big on bluetooth for adding peripherals - keyboard support, or game controllers, including the iCade, would be killer. Simeon and the guys want to do multiplayer support, a peer-to-peer game thing, which sounds cool, but wouldn’t be super useful to me in particular (We only have one ipad here, share it, so until we support iphone with a player, it won’t be usable for me). To me, multiplayer is networking, not bluetooth. But just because a feature isn’t useful to me doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea, and so I say go for it. There’s enough stuff in the beta right now to keep me busy for a while.
Heh - the iCade shows up as a bluetooth keyboard. So - kill two birds with one stone there. And, I’m led to understand most (or all) of the bluetooth addons designed for the ipad/iphone have “icade emulation mode”.
Good point. I wish apple would allow Codea to open things that would be something like a .codeaplugin which are bits of C code plugins that allow you access things like the microphone or camera.
Actually I thought that opening the engine was on the books. You couldn’t use a C extension in Codea but you could with the open sourced engine in your own app.
99 bucks a year to get anything you can code in Objective C (or presumably lua when the Codea guys release the engine, or if you want to pay for other third party libraries, or if you’re pretty awesome) onto your ipad, and N other ipads as beta guys. I don’t know how high N is - I want to say it was 100 max? Not sure, the Codea guys should know. You also can put your app up to be in the app store if apple’s somewhat arbitrary approval process allows you to - they take a flat 30%.
Or - for more money ($500 I think?) there’s a corporate dev license - same basic thing except no app store, and apple doesn’t get to approve your apps - you can distribute them to anyone you see fit. Is there a limit? I don’t recall, but if there was, it was much bigger.
I’m angry at Apple right now for being poopy-heads, but it’s actually not a horrible deal. For that hundred bucks, they deal with credit card processing, upload/download/server and the store, and even some promotion if your app is promising. There are worse languages to deal with than Objective C, and again if you’re awesome you can embed lua now, so it’s easier to deal with than it may have been in the past. If I had a killer Codea app and the engine, I’d spring for the 100 bucks, and maybe sell it and break even? who knows.
You can use C++ and plain C if you like, and are willing to avoid UIKit, the foundation classes, and so on. (Games can easily do this.) I really like Objective-C, though. The wordiness is nice. It’s very readable.
The beta limit is 100 devices, refreshed once per year.
It’s a pretty inexpensive fee considering that an actual human reviews every single submission you make. You get two technical support requests (dealing with code level problems). And you get all the services specified by @Bortels.
