Just what I wanted ... a complete IDE – Pythonista 3 Review

I am astounded at the depth of the Pythonista IDE. I have an iPad Pro and a keyboard and I was able to program a 2D game while sitting on my couch. In no time, I was using sound, touch, motion and gestures and had a fairly reasonable UI cobbled together. I even built an ‘asyncio’ based event loop and felt like it was pretty sophisticated for something whipped up in a few hours. Given some of the iPad’s limitations, probably not the best IDE for serious development, but definitely much more than just a toy. I need to do a little more research on how to effectively do source code control, for example, because a few times I accidentally edited a file without noticing and then it was hard to figure out how to repair it. This never happens on my desktop because I can just go to the previous version in source code control. The standard library implementation meant that I was able to port over a lot of code that I had written on my desktop and it worked immediately! I had a game engine that I had written to be independent of the UI, and it ported over easily. That was a huge timesaver. I just had to figure out how to wrap a touch based UI onto it. It was a little awkward figuring out how to get the files over, but that isn’t the apps fault, that is the nature of IOS. I used a zip file that I placed on Google Drive and it was pretty straightforward after that. I used the “iCloud” folder and my app runs equally well on my iPhone 8. I even fixed a few bugs over lunch using only my Phone, but I wouldn’t recommend doing too much coding without a keyboard. For a Python programming looking to write code on an IOS device, I can’t imaging a better environment. Definitely happy with my purchase.
Review by RJBarry on Pythonista 3.