Editing and Workflow Tips

On many small Android devices, the text editor built into RFO Basic is not the most comfortable or productive environment for editing code. It's also often helpful to copy/paste code from files or web sites (such as this tutorial) from your desktop computer, directly into the RFO Basic interpreter. One way to do that is to use an Android Emulator that runs on your desktop computer. Youwave and Bluestacks are two emulators that work with RFO Basic in Windows and Mac OS. Unfortunately, emulators are large programs that use many system resources, so they may run slowly on all but the most powerful desktop computers.

A more efficient option is to connect your Android device to your desktop computer using a USB cable, and set the connection type to Disk Drive. With this done, you can edit and save program code using any text editor, then reload and run it in RFO Basic.

A wireless option is to use programs such as Wifi File Transfer to set up a server on your phone, then connect using the web browser on your desktop PC, to transfer edited files. This is an easy way to get code back and forth between your Android and PC wirelessly, without setting up any software on the desktop machine.

Android file explorer apps such as the free ES File Explorer provide yet another way to edit and tranfer code. Upload your edited code files to an FTP server or save to a shared network folder (on your desktop PC, right click any folder and select " share with", to share it on your local area network). You can then open the files directly with ES File Explorer - it provides simple direct loading and editing of files on FTP servers and LAN shares. From the ES file editor, you can copy/paste code into the RFO Basic editor. This can be a useful option if several people need to share/edit the same code.

If you do a lot of code editing directly on your Android device, it can be helpful to use a software keyboard such as A.I. Type, which supports Undo/Redo, cursor keys, and other useful editing features. This keyboard can be used directly in the RFO Basic code editor, but other editors such as Jota and DroidEdit provide similar features.

The tool preferred by this author is Wifi File Transfer. Edit code using your favorite desktop text editor, save and transfer to the /sdcard/rfo-basic/source/ folder on your Android using Wifi File Transfer, then (re)open and run it with RFO Basic. (Be sure to check " Overwrite existing files" when using this process). This procedure is simple, quick, and allows you to copy/paste/edit/run back and forth between any desktop PC and Android device in only a few seconds, without wires, and without any software configuration on the desktop (Wifi File Transfer does not require shared folders, login credententials, etc. - just a browser and a network connection).

In order to execute the numerous Edit/Transfer/Run cycles required to write and debug any type of code, it's essential to become perfectly at home (and FAST) with at least one of these routines.