This coding app aims to teach young kids coding with the aid of visual stimulation. Kids learn to bring their creative ideas to life on this app via games and simulations. Codea makes use of cool iPad functions such as the accelerometer and multi-touch features to help bring ideas to life.

Website: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id439571171?mt=8

What Users Love About the App

“I once used Pythonista 3 and Python for my programming needs on iOS. It seems that the application is now floundering without any new releases. I ran across Codea and gave it a try. I am glad I did! The app is very professional-looking and easy to use. It is true what they say about creating complex apps in minutes. Now, it would be great if we could just update the XCode export to include assets and clean up the project warnings. Great job!”

“This makes the new iPad I just got that much more insane. Developing good games in iOS,  mind blown. Not to mention, the developers’ responses to reviews are funny and attentive. This is money well spent and I highly recommended it!”

“This is not a toy app. It’s a serious Lua IDE with a serious set of very good libraries that allow you to create non-trivial apps of your own. It’s very suitable to learn coding (i.g lua) and a good platform to create the apps you want to. I literally have been coding with this app while I am standing on the train during my commute.”

“Being able to export to Xcode and publish apps is the most important feature to me. The editor is awesome. Best developer environment on the App Store.”

“If you have any interest in programming, either because you want to make something for fun or because you’re a technology professional, Codea is a great way to spend some of your free time. You can take advantage of all the main features of the iPad as a development platform. Quite easily, too. It includes multitouch recognition and an accelerometer. New iPad developers can learn methods for leveraging the iPad’s strengths, and pros can use it to rapidly create prototypes of ideas. As recent app store developments have shown us, creating an application for submission to Apple is possible almost entirely via Codea.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“Codea falls short only in that there is not an easy way to add your own resources, such as graphics or sounds, to the available pallet. Version 1.4, however, is supposed to solve that problem—at least for graphics. This limitation is worth docking one star from its score because the look of an application is very important to its creation. Limiting a creator in this way is crippling, even considering how powerful Codea is. My rating will go up as soon as this is fixed.”

“Completely intuitive and easy to get into. Though I must mention the issue of button sizes—some are a bit small. Yes, a sharing option would be awesome, to showcase each other’s work. Plus, a link to codify specific programming forums for user-generated references, guides, and solutions to programming challenges would also be great.”

“While this does a really good job at what it does, there are a few minor things that could make it even better. These are my suggestions: 1) It would be nice for new programmers if there were some step-by-step tutorials to show them the ropes. 2) I would like to see the APIs expand to include more functions outside of those for making games. For example, a way to get the current date and times (as opposed to just programming the execution time), a way to provide text input (rather than sliders), and a way to draw text to the screen. 3) I tend to use Arrays a lot, so it would be nice if there was a square bracket shortcut button. Lastly, please be aware that this does NOT allow you to create your own standalone iOS applications. Lua is designed to be an embedded interpreted language, which means that it is designed to allow you to write a script that executes inside of the application it is running in. In this case, Codify provides an easy scripting framework to some core functions that you might want to run. This gives you a simple environment to learn about programming and maybe even make something fun for yourself to use.”

“Latest release has introduced a crash bug that didn’t exist before. I have been using this tool for about two years and I like it very much!”

“It now randomly crashes out of the editor, but not while it runs the program. Usually, it happens in response to my typing or moving the cursor. Please fix.”

“Codea needs bugs fixed right now because it keeps crashing every time I try to do anything with my documents.”

“Please add an export as an obj. function to the voxel editor. This would cut the annoyance of restoring examples removing the voxel model you are currently working on.”