I grabbed Codea back when it was Codify, as soon as I saw it, in what I suspect was the first week it was out.
When it did, there was no font support - so I rolled my own (as did many). I like to think our discussions and shared implementations inspired TLL to do their own native font support (which is of course miles better than what we could do).
I’ve followed thru as the TLL team added awesome new features - fonts, meshes, physics, editor improvements, and now web access; what was cool before has become cool and useful, and there’s no end in sight.
So - what’s next? We all have our own wishlists. I know from experience that one good way to NOT get a feature added is to not talk about it. So - here’s my own wishlist. Yours may vary. Perhaps TLL can pick and choose from this to get an idea of what people want, and maybe even get ideas they hadn’t really thought of…
In no special order:
– file I/O, treating the Codea Documents directory as the ‘root’, Projects as folders, and tabs as files. Presumably a project would have write access to it’s own project, and read access to others. This would let us save data files in an editable manner, and provide some library support.
– Access to the Camera(s) - the ability to capture an image from either camera opens up photo processing, augmented reality, all sorts of fun.
– GPS, compass - to go along with accelerometer. Being able to get GPS gives all sorts of mapping and geo data apps a leg up, and with both GPS and the compass you can get some real-world bearings for things like maps and charting.
– bluetooth for gaming - being able to communicate peer-to-peer opens up a world of collaborative apps (and by that I mean mostly games, but hey).
– rendering web - I think that’s an ios built-in; if we could load and render to an image arbitrary web pages, we’d get some built-in support for CSS and SVG, and a nice way to do docs.
– airplay - this just came to me, as I got an apple tv yesterday. I noticed the youtube app will display video on airplay, with the screen having the youtube info (ie. it doesn’t just mirror). If we could access airplay as a seperate graphics context, there would be FUN things we could do. Crazy fun.
– Project export and import - I know apple shot down .codea - maybe it’s time to see if they’d reconsider? Or, failing that, if we could at least export a project (as a zip file, I beg of thee), then people could import with iExplorer or such, and/or simply cut and paste from a zip importing app.
– binary access to images - I’d like to be able to get to the binary data of an image, as a buffer, rather than have to get/set individual pixels, for a ton of reasons.
I’m sure I’m forgetting things, and I’ll edit or add them later. If you have something you think would be cool, add it on. If nothing else, we may find things we can accomplish on our own (this whole post was inspired by doing file i/o wrapped around the existing image stuff). Or, perhaps we’ll inspire TLL to add something we all want.
PS. It’s been said, but I’ll say it again: Thank you, TLL, for an awesome app, and for continuing to add features and support it post-launch. This is head-and-shoulders the coolest thing on the iPad IMHO, and a big part of that is your continued support of it.
