Miguel de Icaza

Blissful UI Development with SwiftUI and Godot.

Xogot is a SwiftUI interface built on top of the Godot engine. To speed up development, we needed a way to build large portions of the user interface without having to compile and deploy the entire project every time. A full build of the app in Godot takes a couple

Giving users some Quick Wins

When I first started using Godot as a casual observer, I could tell it was a very powerful system, but I also struggled to get some basic things in place. While certainly following tutorials, reading forums, and participating online would bring clarity, I felt that there were parts of Godot

Xogot: Animations Tab

Let me start by apologizing for not posting updates more frequently. I am sure a better engineer would have found the time to use an AI bot to write this, but instead, I have decided to expand my list of unmarketable skills and write this update on my own -

Xogot Preview Update

One month ago, we began publishing TestFlight previews of Xogot to those who signed up for our private preview.   If you’re not already in the preview program, you can sign up to join the Xogot TestFlight here. I had been dragging my feet on publishing this release to squeeze

Xogot: Godot on iPad Preview

We are now ready for folks interested in testing it and finding places where we fall short of the expectations of iPadOS users and aspiring game developers to take it for a spin and help us identify the bumps in the road.

Godot on iPad: Summer Update

This is a long-due update on porting Godot to the iPad.  Shortly after my last blog post covering the development work on May 29th, Apple held its WWDC 2024 conference.   I went into the conference with gusto, expecting to fully embrace all the iOS 18 APIs. I already knew by

Godot on iPad, Part 8: Code Editing

This post continues the series on creating an iPad-native UI for Godot using SwiftUI. Today, I will discuss how I replaced the text editing experience in Godot for iPad with a native user experience. The Godot editor is written as a Godot application, and the text editor for authoring code

Part 7: Project Settings

This post continues the series on creating an iPad-native UI for Godot using SwiftUI. Once Godot's main user interface elements were rewritten into SwiftUI, I looked for the next high-traffic target and landed on the Project Settings dialog. My original intent was to ship Godot on iPad with

Part 6: It's time for some Menu Game Theory.

The next victim on my quest to iPad-ificate Godot was the top-level menu. Despite having a slender menu in an industry dominated by uncontrolled menu bloat, on the iPad, this menu still looks like ordering a burrito at a French restaurant. I am not a UI designer, so I rely

Part 5: Making Godot Viable on iPadOS: Development Loop

Before I embarked on pouring my heart and soul into making a native iPadOS user experience of Godot, I needed to make sure that I would end up with a viable version of Godot. Building Godot to run on iPad is straightforward. The command line to do this is quite

Part 4: Godot with SwiftUI

At my talk in November, I talked about my work on the Swift bindings for Godot - allowing Swift developers to write Godot games using Swift and accessing the API that Godot exposes to developers. I also proposed rewriting chunks of Godot's own Game Editor using Swift. I

Part 3: iGodot: ScenePad

In the previous post, I discussed the role of the Split View on iGodot. In this post, I will discuss the ScenePad, which sits at the top of the sidebar on the left: The ScenePad plays an essential role in developing your game. It provides a way of managing the

iGodot: Split View

This is part of the "iGodot" series of blog posts where I discuss the design and engineering decisions for adapting Godot to be a bonafide iPad application. You will find some familiar elements when you first launch the Godot Editor on a desktop.  The UI is divided into

iGodot

Last fall, I realized you could compile the Godot game engine to run on the iPad. This presented exciting possibilities, combining two of my loves: the Godot open-source project, and the iPad operating system. And while Godot can run on the iPad with minimal effort, it remains essentially a desktop

Simpler Terminal Input

Command line users are known to spend inordinate sums of money on custom keyboards with special sounds to set their mood and achieve flow. Using a terminal on iPhones or iPads can interrupt this flow as you are you are forced to peck your way around an on-screen keyboard, rendering

El Cubo: La Terminal Enters the Third Dimension

We launched La Terminal just over a year ago with a vision of pushing the boundaries of what the command line experience could be in this mobile-first era, and today we are excited to announce the launch of El Cubo, which will take your terminal experience beyond the two-dimensional confines

El Comandante: Leading your files to victory

We are thrilled to announce the release of La Terminal 1.4 - our most impressive update yet! Packed with new features and important improvements, this version caters to the needs of all La Terminal users. These features are so bold in nature, that we updated our icon to accentuate

El Preservador: SSHing Responsibly on iOS

With La Terminal, we strive to offer an SSH client that just works on iOS. With this in mind, I set out to make design decisions on behalf of users that would provide an experience that works out of the box while providing the best terminal emulator experience they deserve.

Introducing El Copiloto: The AI Assistant for La Terminal

Today, we are introducing El Copiloto - an AI assistant to help you craft commands when connected to a remote system using La Terminal. With El Copiloto, you no longer have to struggle with remembering complex commands or scouring the internet for solutions to your terminal problems. Simply tap the

Welcome to La Terminal

Towards Better Terminal Emulators In 1992, I fell in love with Unix and Linux, and I set this as my new home. I was coming from the world of DOS and Windows. While DOS was a limited operating system, there was a tremendous amount of innovation in text user interfaces.