Code Monkey for iPhone and iPad Review

Our rating:

By: ToolUsr

Version #: 1.4.5

Date Released:

Developer:

Price: 7.99

User Rating:

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Software development on the iPad is not something that is possible yet. Sure you can make mockups for web sites, iOS apps and more. Sure you can type your ideas into mind maps, which is a great help. But you cannot easily develop full fledged applications or web sites on the iPad. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not; only time will tell. Until then I will be looking for tools to help me when i’m on the road and when I don’t have my laptop with me.

In my search I found a good number of apps that I downloaded from iTunes to help me with software development. One of those tools is Code Monkey. And to be honest, this has been a very good experience to me. The tool aims to be a kind of high and low level swiss army knife for programmers and the author is hacking in more and more features to make it to that point.

The most prominent tool is the UML drawing tool. As the name says you can make class diagrams with it. You create projects, add classes, attributes and methods to it. You can add code (pseudo code or real code) to the methods and that way you can create complete projects from your lap. Sure they won’t really execute but you can use them as guidelines for your implementation which is very helpful. Once you mastered the slightly awkward interface and naming, you’ll be architecting your apps with great speed.

Another, very helpful, but much more low level tool is the calculator, which shows you, in a very intelligent interface, binary, hexadecimal and octal numbers in calculations. When you are coding this is a big help. The keyboard of the calculator is big and so it is ideal to have next to you when coding.

Last but not least there are two references built in; a reference for regular expressions and a reference for design patterns. The latter is not very complete yet, but is enough for novices to learn from and use to jog their memory so they can use the patterns in UML. The regular expression lookup is even great for experts who sometimes forget exact formulations.

I really enjoyed this app, but this feeling is tainted by the fact there is almost nothing for developers on the iPad yet. I hope the author will keep on extending it. I’ll keep on using it.

We rate this app 3.5 out of 5 stars.