HN user

donny

273 karma
Posts16
Comments30
View on HN

Hi everyone, I'm the developer here. I made it to scratch my itch: an iPad app for managing gists. And, the Heroku deployment is just the additional feature. You can use it to deploy your micro web sites or web services.

Some promo codes

RJEE6HTMHMT3

WME4NXA4FJ6R

6HW6A3FPF4TT

N6WJMTLFXNP3

HFWR6JAMH9JN

Hope you'll like it.

This looks awesome. Congrats. Just wondering, why do you pick browser as the IDE? (as a background, I've been developing iPad IDE called Worqshop).

It's an honest question. How does the IDE perform using the iPad Safari? I thought about doing web-based IDE but found the performance very slow in my testing. Ultimately, it boils down to native vs web apps.

Nevertheless, kudos to you. I know that doing front-end web UI, dealing with AWS, and provisioning the boxes, are not trivial problems.

Edit: Just to preempt, yes, I know my app restricts developers to use iPad :)

Ups... reading the comments below... you will be providing SSH access to the VMs

IMHO ….

Disclaimer: I'm doing something similar http://worqshop.com. The difference is the angle. It's not just a text editor with file transfer (FTP, Dropbox, etc.). I'm doing an IDE for the iPad. With GitHub support (and soon, Heroku deployment).

At the moment, iPad is not very good as a development environment, since Apple doesn't allow you to compile / run code on the iPad directly. You need backend support (e.g. cloud) that allows you to edit / compile / run code on the iPad.

But an iPad with multi touch interface and a bluetooth keyboard opens up a lot of interesting possibilities as an IDE. For example, the multi touch interface allows you to choose colour graphically (see http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Screen-Colors.png ). Rather than experimenting with different values of RGB, you can just tap it.

I'm still building Worqshop. Thus, I'm not using the iPad as a development tool. I still need Xcode and my Mac :) At the moment, I'm using Worqshop to edit some HTML/CSS on GitHub, building HTML5 apps with Worqshop + GitHub + StackMob….. And soon, with Heroku deployment support, I can write Ruby / Python apps on my iPad and deploy it to Heroku.

Footnote 1: I still think the bluetooth keyboard is necessary for fast typing. I can't type very fast with the on screen keyboard

Footnote 2: I still prefer to code using text rather than using graphical items (i.e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language ). Simply because text is a very compact representation of the semantics of code. As an example, to represent the semantic of "if / then / else" you only need a few lines of code. But with visual programming language, you need a bunch of nodes with graphs, etc. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ktechlab_FlowCode.png )

Python for iOS 14 years ago

Nice. So, it's possible to integrate the interpreter on iOS? My app http://worqshop.com has the Python editor (with syntax highlighting) and GitHub support. But, no interpreter!

I spent half a year to develop this. It's still small, a minimum viable product, and I'm adding more features (and fixing bugs).

The goal is to have an IDE for the iPad and not just another editor (Simplenote, Evernote, etc).

At the moment, it supports importing projects from GitHub and pushing changes to GitHub. But, with the GitHub web hooks you can do some nice things: update your GitHub pages, deploy your app to AppHarbor or StackMob from your iPad, etc…

Hi HN, the developer here.

Short story: I quit my job last year and spent half a year to develop this. It's still small, a minimum viable product, and I'm adding more features (and fixing bugs).

The goal is to have an IDE for the iPad and not just another editor (Simplenote, Evernote, etc).

At the moment, it supports importing projects from GitHub and pushing changes to GitHub. But, with the GitHub web hooks you can do some nice things: update your GitHub pages, deploy your app to AppHarbor or StackMob from your iPad, etc…

https://github.com/blog/961-deploy-to-appharbor-from-github http://www.stackmob.com/devcenter/docs/StackMob-Hosted-HTML5...

There are a few bugs that I discovered yesterday. So, please bear with me :)

We got inquiries about creating cases for the Air (that we're prototyping at the moment). Also, inquiries about wholesale (and asking us to brand the cases for them). We declined this for the No1 product. But we're willing to do the branding and manufacturing for other products designed by them. Unfortunately, towards the end, they didn't reply to any of our emails. So, I guess, lost opportunity there.

At the moment, the process is not very scalable: manual Skype calls, but no automation whatsoever. I thought about scaling it, but so far we're okay without the automation. So, maybe when there is a huge demand, we will try to scale it.

Thanks for the Cafepress idea, but I'm not sure whether it can work. I think people can go to Etsy and do the design/manufacture??