Coding away from the keyboard

Whilst working on a program to automatically generate mazes, I realised that most of my spare time for this kind of thing is either when watching TV, or when I’m away from home, such as on the park and ride bus to and from work. As I was looking to solve the problem using JavaScript/HTML there is no compiler involved, so some kind of editor app for my phone would be ideal. Sure enough there are several in the App Store, I settled on Expresso HTML, well because it looks nice, has some useful shortcuts to characters such as “<", has a handy inbuilt browser to preview my efforts – oh and it's free.


Coding on the go is fairly tough going, the virtual keyboard obscures half of the screen and doesn’t allow tabs (double space indentation!), but it is easy to switch between preview and editor mode, and you can work on multiple files. Ideal for small projects and experimenting on the go – it was enough to get my maze generator finished and working, details of how I got on to follow in a future post. If it had an in-built FTP client it would be great for making for emergency corrections.

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