As programmers, we all love writing code, or at least I hope you do because if you don't, what are you doing here?
Since we love writing code, we need some tool we can write with, which is called an IDE, but you already know that. There are many to choose from; in fact, you could choose IntelliJ, Eclipse, Xcode, Android Studio, NetBeans, fight whether Visual Studio is better than Visual Studio Code, or write with pen and paper for all I care. But you still need to choose a path. Everyone chooses the tool they prefer based on different criteria like what hardware they will be coding on, the OS, what languages and frameworks they will be using, and so on.
What you will never ask yourself is, "What if I could do it on Android?" And yet that is what I asked myself. Before you call me crazy, let me explain.
While thinking up my next million-dollar app idea, I came up with an app. So what is it?
My one-dollar app isn't the app idea I initially came up with; it's the app idea I developed as a consequence of certain events that arose after starting to work on the million-dollar app. While having to travel somewhere, I wanted to work on my million-dollar idea. I have a laptop, but it's huge, the battery doesn't last long, and it weighs a ton. Being a gaming laptop I bought a while back, it wasn’t ideal for travel. A little counter-intuitive to say the least.
A couple of months ago, I purchased a Lenovo M11 tablet to use for productivity purposes, or at least that’s what I like to tell myself to justify my impulse buy. Being that I have this tablet, I thought, "What if I could code from this?"
I already knew there were compiler apps on the Google Play Store, having used some of them before, but I code using the Flutter framework, not Python or C/C++. I did some research and couldn't find an alternative to solve this "problem," which technically was only curiosity to find out if it was possible. I went from looking through running certain software meant for desktop systems on mobile, creating binaries from Android, to using VMs. So much to learn, but nothing I was interested in using.
So, like any delusional programmer, I decided to code a solution myself. I totally abandoned my million-dollar idea and started working on an IDE for Android devices (only tablets, as you would need to be crazier than me to think you can do it on a mobile phone).
This is my progress:
As you may notice, it’s highly inspired by the VSCode layout, simply because I want it to be easy to move from one to the other without having too many differences in functionality.
Before you say, "Hey, how are you going to debug, compile, test...?" or "What about packages and libraries?" or anything like that, I have a solution. I just don't know if it will work 100%, so I'll keep it a secret for the time being.
The idea would be that users can use this as a normal IDE for programming of any kind of programming.
It's a huge goal with much road to cover, in fact it's still a work in progress, nowhere near an MVP, but I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish and I am enjoying learning new things while making this one-dollar app project.
Any feedback is welcome. I will most likely post an update on my progress next week.
Happy coding :)
Top comments (0)