The playgrounds in Xcode was a very welcome addition – saving time and testing simple functions. Xcode allows for previewing your mobile projects, nearly live. The ‘playground’ capability in CodeNeighbor is not a 100% mirror of what Xcode provides, but does allow for non UI (for now) Swift code invoke actions and shows the results, or errors (hopefully not).
The next version of this will support UI invocations and screen captures of your creative masterpieces.
Just a bit of brevity … we all spend a lot of time absorbing tech, attending meetings and missing our deadlines (hopefully not too much). Since we are largely remote, all we have to talk to, in person, is either our mailman, our dog, or our cat.
We will focus on the cat in this entry.
My cat (and she has two step sisters – a german shepherd and a labrador retriever) has been well fed … well snacked and has a weekly offering of tuna to honor her presence.
Over the years (Amelia is 4.5 years old) … she has accumulated more mass, and less bones, to the point there I truly believe, she no longer has any bones. When I pet her, I dont feel any bones and clearly, due to the massive volume of fur (a calico) has, she exposes no evidence of bones whatsover.
So, blame it on the parentage, the over consumption of snacks (tuna can’t be blamed, as it is lean) or the lack of forced exercise (have you ever tried to take your cat for a walk) … she has experienced what Wall-E has verified – bones have diminshed.
Take this moment, to reflect on your own household and whether you over-snack your animals, as we do, but, don’t feel remorse, but rather – joy, that at least, your animals are, and have forever, worked from home.
Working in a ‘silo’, as they call it, is more normal these days now that we are (mostly) not in the office daily. Even so, when we get a user story or task, off we go to the races and start work. There are times however, when we need to work with others for inspiration, share ideas and code (snippets) and to discuss the latest episode of Stranger Things.
This is where collaboration comes in – between sharing assets with team members (and building team member groups), engaging in chat and now, whiteboarding, collaboration takes team interaction to a whole new level. CodeNeighbor has started the journey of interactive whiteboarding amongst teams and this will truly enable remote workers to stay in touch, share ideas and collaborate easily.
Get out your markers (virtual ones) and start planning to share with your team !
Flow based design and development is nothing new, from early versions of workflow tools to ESB platforms, they execute payloads with seemingly ease. However, that’s typically where the magic gets lost – there is always a complicated side of the house when the work gets started.
CodeNeighbor is building a toolset for visual development that embodies the drag and drop and visual design metaphor with ease of use. The secret lies in …. (well, we cant tell you too much about the magic) keeping things simple. There are flows that aide in building functions, classes, projects. Then there are flow for designing models, services and testing.
Lest not we forget about the flows that are used for handy, daily automated things, like visual search, scheduled messaging and … well, all will be laid bare soon. For now, be patient while the paint dries and know that when the time is right, we will notify our neighborhoods for these great new features ! As always – stay tuned !
— Pete (landlord)