Hi. I have noticed that the majority of the sample apps created have been games. Not so surprising when you consider the opportunity if it clicks with people. I’ve prototyped an app idea for my company in Excel with the purpose of developing an iOS app. It is currently being used to test the concept with success so far. The closest app you could say it is like is quoting / invoicing. Is it possible to use Codea to develop it into a fully functional app or a prototype iOS app. I’m not a programmer and in fact couldn’t program anything to save my life so I like the idea of Codea or at least what I’ve seen so far. Thanks in advance for your help… Cheers
Yes it is possible to make whatever app you want with Codea and put it on the appstore. However Apple restricts the exchange of data so strongly that it can be a no-go for professionnal use: you can easily use file exchange only via the web, not via usb key (unless you jailbreak) or usb link (then itunes must run on the PC, or you must use iExplorer, which is not professionally safe). web only data exchange is usually forbidden by company policies (who knows what the NSA is doing with your data? Hello guys, nothing personal!.).
Fantastic thank you for your quick response. We use Salesforce so I could probably use Codea to create a functional prototype with existing costing data and once ok’d use the Salesforce Mobile SDK to pull live data. Well beyond my abilities but a functional prototype that the team finds useful might enable development for global rollout. I work for Fujifilm. All this sounds very nice but I have absolutely no idea how to do it. Every time I read the guides I start to get a headache and need a drink! Sadly I’m passionate about the tremendous opportunity we have with these tools but stopped learning as a teenager after the Commodore 64 so every time I look at code I need a drink. Cheers
I would stay with the Excel version and let a professional write the mobile code. Such an app needs to be very watertight, especially if you have salespeople using it! If you need any help with Excel/VBA, let me know, it’s my specialty.
Hahahah! It’s universal no where you are or what you do engineers think salespeople are tools and salespeople think engineers screw everything up (no pun intended). Sadly I’m a salesperson but I think it’s hard to have both ie sales won’t happen without the service and support and generally sales won’t happen without the sales person. Ive got a lot of respect for engineering as we couldn’t sell anything without it. I’ve also got app cooker so I can probably visually design what I would like with simple clicks and then give it to someone to develop it further. I could do it so it looks up an internal database with the data I need and update the app when it changes as opposed to a live connection to the ERP. It’s not mission critical to do so. Cheers
Codea runs a game style loop with draw calls every frame. This makes it great for games and graphical things like physics simulations. For apps you can do this, but you have to bootstrap your way through building a UI platform for it. There are some on the forum, search for Cider and windowing libraries.
If I was prototyping an app though I might consider looking at other tools in the appstore such as pythonista as I think they let you use the apple controls and stuff (could be wrong I haven’t looked at them myself).
I say this loving Codea and what it can do, but for rapidly prototyping business style apps it’s probably not the best bet.
Hi and thanks for your reply. I’ve got app cooker so I might have a go with that. I guess I thought that there was a more graphical tool to build apps or app prototypes eg draw a box and tell it that it equals first name which I guess is a lot like Excel and FileMaker. I can understand though that it can’t be that simple. It’s interesting that when you see these dev tools it looks so simple which it is compared to what you would normally do but when an amateur sees then they look overly simple which is the problem with amateurs like myself. Cheers
Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage all salespeople. My experience was mainly with insurance agents who were hopeless with technology. And a large part of my business experience has been in developing in house apps for users, which the IT department then tried to ignore. So I do understand your situation, and I think that prototyping your idea is a great way to go.
@mozzie Cider isn’t half bad for prototyping. You can at least drag on some controls and labels to play with ideas.