Hacker shine

Updated

Programming used to be a hacker thing: men in black sitting on the floor, bending over a laptop that has some key parts missing (or even wires coming out), and the only source in the dark room at 3 am in the morning is the dim light from the monitor. Nowadays though, programmers get some shine.

Codea is a touch-based programming app for the iPad, that lets developers create games and simulations. Of course, it’s more a toy than a heavy weight development environment (and since the current kit doesn’t support any kind of publishing, the final games will never leave the iPad itselfI was awfully wrong! See below). Not like it’s a big deal, no one will cry over missing out those “amazing things” created with Codea.

So the time is not now, yes, but the damage has been made: as more and more development tools will come out, eventually, programmers will be changing their black bricks into shiny toys – just like journalist did some time ago.

Whoha-hoo.

Update: as @TwoLivesLeft said on Twitter, there is a solution to turn apps made with Codea into native iOS apps, and the code for this is already on Github. One example app in the App Store is Cargo Bot, available for free for iPad.