Codea for iOS gamedev adds in browser code editing

 

Some time back I purchased Codea for my iPad.  Codea is a Lua based game programming kit for creating iOS games on the iPad and frankly it’s really kinda cool.  That said, actually typing code on the device is a bit of a pain, so I looked coming up with an alternative.  It worked, but it certainly wasn’t ideal.  Today I was on the AppStore and I noticed Codea had an update and added something called Air Code, which allows you to connect to Codea using your web browser.

 

Using Air Code is really easy, in Codea on your iPad, open the side menu and select AirCode:

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Then it will tell you the address to open in your browser.  Your computer and iPad need to be on the same network for this to work:

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Open that address in your desktop browser and a list of your available projects will be displayed:

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You then select the code file to edit and the editor appears:

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As you code in the browser, it updates live on the iPad:

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That is very very very cool.

Right now the editing functionality in the browser is quite limited.  It’s basically a text editor only now.  Hopefully in the future they add intellisense support and possibly debugging.  This is a very nice start though, and easily gets around the lack of keyboard support.  Nicely, this process doesn’t require a Mac either, any web browser should work fine.  Coding on one screen and seeing the changes reflect live on the other is actually a very intuitive way to code.

I did run into a small bug, in that focusing away from Codea to check email, when returning I could no longer connect via browser.  Shutting down and restarted Codea fixed the problem.

So, if you have an iPad and another PC and want to create games, Codea is a very cool product and worth checking out!

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