Another really great app has come to the iPad, one which really enforces the reasoning that you can actually do real work on an iPad.
Continuous is a fully fledged .NET IDE for the iPad, made by Frank A. Krueger, which lets you program in C# 6 and F# 4. It has support for things like code highlighting, code completion, and even live code execution. It’s really feature packed.
It’s even more than just an IDE:
But it’s not “just an IDE”. I didn’t want it to simply be sufficient – I wanted it to be great. I also thought it was a nice time to push the state of the art in .NET IDEs a tad.
For ages compiled languages like C# and F# have forced a sequential development loop on programmers: the Code-Compile-Run-Test loop. We code something up, wait for it to compile, then wait for it to deploy and run, then we get to test it.
I hate waiting for compilation and deployment so I designed Continuous to minimize those steps. It does this by eagerly compiling your code – never waiting for you to tell it when to start. It runs your code as soon as those compiles complete successfully and displays the results of that execution right next to your code. Now you can focus on the code and the results of that code instead of being distracted by all the silly machinery of a compiler and IDE. – praeclarum.org
I won’t be using it myself, as I don’t use these languages. But I can totally see that this is a great app for other programmers, and also another big step for the iOS platform as a whole.
You can read more about Continuous, the reasoning behind the app, and also some more geeky details over at praeclarum.org.
If you want to check the app out, then you can buy it from the App Store for just £7.99! That’s really spectacular pricing for an app of this calibre.