Summertime, and the Swedish weather is ... not great, but good enough! I have spent some of the vacation days here at the countryside of beautiful Värmland, Sweden, without writing any code at all. But ideas have popped up and I want to try them out. So, now I code when everybody is sleeping. The "Dark Theme" of the editor dim the bright screen light - and hopefully won't wake up the family in the middle of the night.
Direct link: Here's some example code I have written that will get you up and running with ES2015 and/or TypeScript on your iPad.
Offline coding
I really want to write code on my iPad mini, instead of using the laptop (that I also have with me, of course). With low bandwidth - sometimes no connection at all - remoting to & write code on a Cloud based VM is not an option here in the wilderness. Local and offline is better. The Coda for iOS app supports local offline files and the latest version has some really nice features. But why code on an iPad? Well ... why not! And it's convenient too, experimenting with code snippets is just a smart device away from being realized. The solutions I present here are of course useful for countryside coding on a laptop too.
ES2015 on the iPad
I decided to give ES2015 coding a try. Does it work, using an iPad and the app only? Yes, the built in web browser and file system of Coda for iOS makes it possible. When I figured out how to transpile and run the scripts in the web browser (by using Babel and the es6-module-loader library), I got carried away and thought it would be cool to also write TypeScript on the iPad. It turns out to be just as easy as the ES2015 setup.
TypeScript on the iPad
I found a nice library on GitHub by Basarat Ali Syed, that makes it possible to transpile TypeScript files to JavaScript in a web browser: basarat/typescript-script
Here's some example code I have written that will get you up and running with ES2015 and/or TypeScript on your iPad.
Command line experimenting with the JavaScript Playground
One of the new features of the Coda app is a command line based JavaScript playground. Scripts can easily be loaded into it and the transpiler functions can be executed from the command line. I think it is a useful alternative to the web browser, and very helpful when I want to see the actual output from a transpilation.
Happy iPad coding!
2 comments:
What's your opinion on TypeScript on iPad? I want to write serious TypeScript code on iPad and thinking - which tools are the best for the case? Is there already language server for ide checks or good autocompletion?
Did you change app or sticked with Coda?
Thanks!
Thank you for commenting!
I didn't dig much deeper than basic experimenting with TypeScript using Coda at the time of the publish date of this blog post. Maybe there's an IDE or editor that supports it today? I know there are a couple of Python coding apps in the App store.
I guess one alternative is to run Remote desktop from the iPad to a machine in the cloud with a full blown IDE installed.
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