Development on the Ipad

Cyberience

Call me a gluten for punishment, but it appears to me that, with the Gideros play on the ipad, it would not be a difficult job to actually edit code on the tablet, I travel a lot, and would love to be able to execute my edited code with the player, is there a way I could do this?
For example a code writing app I use is textatic, it will synch with ftp when I save, if I could write or pass code to gideros player locally on the device, I could have a truly coding on the ipad experience, and achieve more on my daily train rides etc.

Is this possible? could it be added?

phongtt

Your need may be similar to this? http://blog.magnusviri.com/gideros-downloader.html

Cyberience

Ah Work around using external Server to push changes to the Gideros client. A nice option, ill test it out.

techdojo

There's also Codea - which whilst not Gideros is still Lua based and does have a very similar class structure so porting code is quite easy - although they do use different rendering engines (retained (Gideros) vs direct (Codea)).

The big advantage though is no internet required.

Mells

There is also that project :
New iOS player - Dropbox, Load previously loaded projects without IDE by @Simpleloop.

Here are a few points where help is needed :

@atilim may need a lil help with how the md5.txt would be generated when downloading them from dropbox and loading the app once it is downloaded but I think the rest of it I can figure out.

And last of all I have added a table with all the apps that are currently saved into the player app in it.
again @atilim a lil help on how I might load the apps when they are tapped in the table view would be great and this would also allow me to load them when downloaded from dropbox.

The only other thing I thought could cause a problem is the debugger as there wouldn't be one, so I was thinking maybe if there was a way I could hook the error message then when it is loaded locally I could just print it into a text field on another view then you could even debug on the device which would be awesome.

@atilim hope you or someone else can help out with this as I think it would be really cool to be able to develop and test fully on the device you're actually building for. And it could also be used in conjunction with another iOS device so you could write on an iPad say and see the changes etc on an iPhone. And could add an auto reload that detects changes on the files on dropbox and reloads the player automatically.

I hope it gets some attention because it's promising.

phongtt

@Mells: welcome back. long time no see. i guess you've been busy with work

Cyberience

This makes me realize that Gideros is interpreted, meaning not compiled, and runs like JavaScript. I do see that encryption is being brought in to hide the code, but I wonder if this effects the performance, and if 95% performance as quoted is true.
I would be interested to understand how the run-time works, does it load and analyze the code and creates an internal action plan via an array of instructions? or reads the code and executes the line by line block, I think Corona probably works in this way too. and when the app is compiled by Xcode, it wraps the 2 together, the run-time engine which is effectively the Gideros player, with the source code as assets, with Titanium, I see that it effectively does the same, but weaves the code into the Xcode more tightly and makes after build and before compile changes possible, but tricky. though Titanium is aimed at IOS and not truly cross platform, mainly due to the different library names it uses for apple and Android libraries.
I wonder if there is any movement towards making it at the very least Pcode, like Java, so it has native internal structures and doesn't need to be interpreted at run-time? If this was the case, you could effectively speed up the run, and reduce the player size, seeing it would be minus the interpreter.

This is not a complaint or question, its just for discussion, and seeing what the current situation is, especially when compared to other implementations.

techdojo

Lua can be either interpreted or compiled down to a byte code and run that way - that's why if you look at the .lua files in your projects tmp folder, you'll see they are binary files not ascii.

There's also LuaJit which apparently gives even better improvements but were still waiting to see if that gets implemented in the future.

If speed is an issue - have a look at the work @GregBug's done on his TNT Collision plugin - which uses C++ across all platforms to do the "heavy lifting" required by the collision function - Ideally this is the way all "heavy lifting" should be done, saving the Lua for the game logic.

gorkem

Luajit.. I can hear the beast coming. He's hiding.. He can be anywhere and everywhere

Nascode

@gorkem Gideros 2013.1 got LuaJIT? We hope so

Cyberience

Can you change the word Game Logic to App Logic.
Cose I am doing both

john26

@gorkem, how cryptic! :-)

techdojo

Maybe he was referring to the squeaky forum beast that utters the cry "me want too, me want too" everytime a new feature is suggested

Mells

@Mells: welcome back. long time no see. i guess you've been busy with work

I'm not "really" back but thank you

I insist that I see a lot of potential in this project :
New iOS player - Dropbox, Load previously loaded projects without IDE by @Simpleloop.

OZApps

@Mells, any news on your latest project? Always a pleasure to see what you are working on.

Mells

@OZApps thanks for your support.
The news are that I lost a considerable amount of money, time and motivation due to some bad choices on my part. So in short I killed the game and other projects. We'll see in a few weeks/months.
I'm actually better at helping companies make money than handling projects to which I'm too emotionally attached to.
I'm now focusing on recovering the losses only and hopefully a few choices I made recently will pay off.
Else, xyz.

OZApps

@Mells, sorry to hear that. Hope what you salvage would be worth and look forward to that.