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Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

akkartik.itch.io

21–29 of 29 posts

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want something like Shoes, perhaps try PySimpleGUI or Redlang's "view" dialect. If you want a drag-and-drop visual builder like HyperCard, you might like Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/

Re: Decker, I these "continuing the legacy of Hypercard" tools didn't also continue with the aesthetics of Mac System 6. At that point just use MiniVMac. Why not embrace 32 bit color and high resolution?

Because I don't care for what those things do to programming environments.

If you take more than a superficial look at Decker, you might find it is capable of quite a bit more than HyperCard in an emulated Mac Plus. If you want it to look different, the project is free, open source, and permissively licensed; do as you please.

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#22
Oh, hey Kartik!

(Just merged your PR into wigwam.directory haha thanks!)

For those who don't know, Kartik's "freewheeling" apps are incredible.

Very much fits in the spirit of Uxn and other small ecosystem projects.

I recommend watching his short lecture and following along with the slides:

[1] https://archive.org/details/freewheeling

[2] http://akkartik.name/freewheeling/

He totally sold me on the viability of Lua, LOVE, and small apps for making better software.

He also has a lovely VM called mu that's worth checking out:

[3] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#23

Looks like this is all based on Love2D. Love2D is amazing. This is cool, but you can just use whatever text editor or IDE you want and dynamically load and replace functions every second or two. Then you can type in a lua development environment and have the love2D window be separate instead of text in your way, which works well in the age of high resolution and multiple monitors. If you catch errors you can just pri…

I 90% agree. The origin story for this project is my collaborator exclusively uses an iPad and wanted to program with LÖVE. He tried a bunch of tools for this, and found various sharp edges in integrating a workflow out of multiple apps while dealing with iOS limitations. The 10% I disagree on is a use case that all modern environments ignore that I think is very important: helping outsiders make changes to the progr…

> ...won't let two copies of a first-class app run simultaneously

Could you maybe setup two different (LÖVE and something else, probably custom) "first-class apps" and ping-pong between them?

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#25

This part is brilliant, the user can modify the app itself while it's running. > Lua Carousel is a "freewheeling" app that you can read and modify the source code for as it runs. The app contains all its source code. It feels similar to a self-hosting language that's written in itself. I love the idea of giving the user the power to modify not only their own programs as they run, but the editor and runtime environmen…

It got Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" type of application vibes to it, nice!

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#26
post #24

How do you run a complete love2d script with the full rendering/event loop?

When you first run it, it shows a few example screens. Some of the later ones demonstrate how you hook into draw, update, events, etc. Basically you can't define love.draw, etc., but rather car.draw, car.update, etc., and Carousel will call those for you inside love.draw, etc.

Does that help?

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#28

This looks great! I was curious to see how it looks on ios but couldn’t determine how to install it or love2d. Anyone have suggestions?

Please try https://love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started#iOS. It's a little involved, unfortunately. But we can talk you through it if you run into any roadblocks.

Re: Show HN: Lua Carousel, create little programs on desktop or mobile devices

#29

Okay here's my initial feedback: - You probably should do the different projects as tabs on the bottom instead of full-height side buttons, especially on Android where the horizontal space is sparse, and make the text editor full-screen. - The other UI elements OTOH are way too small on android. - The BG/FG sliders can be interacted with even while invisible. - On Android, sliding space left/right which moves text no…

> When you touch to move text cursor position, for a frame, a selection flashes

It took me a while to track this down, but it's fixed now: https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/644227/version-ap-a...

Thank you for the report!

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