Continuous for iOS

Continuous is a new app for doing real app development on the iOS using C# and F# written by the same developer who wrote Calca. The cool thing about it is that it has access to the built in iOS frameworks, so the app can be used to build real iOS apps right from your iPad1.

I don’t have much use for Continuous myself since I prefer to do my development in Swift, but I am excited to see more apps like this hit the App Store. Apps like Continuous and Pythonista (which also has access to iOS frameworks, this time in Python) show that there is a market for this type of app. People want to be able to use their iPads for development.

These apps show that it is possible to have a good IDE running on iOS2.


  1. I listened to a podcast a few years back where the developer of Calca mentioned that the app was written in C#. I remember thinking it was a weird language choice at the time, but I have since learned that it is a relatively popular language to do iOS development in. Plus, I can’t argue with the results: Calca is an incredible app. 
  2. One of the things Apple did with Xcode 8 was make the app take up a lot less disk space. It later occurred to me that part of the motivation for that could be to get it running on devices that don’t have as much storage space as most Macs. You know, like an iPad?