Say hello to Tinkerstellar 👋

I know that many of you use Juno apps to learn new things, experiment with things you already know, and even make your first steps in a new field or profession. If that’s you, then you are going to love the new app! The app is similar in concept to Apple’s own Swift Playgrounds: essentially, it’s a collection of interactive tutorials on coding and computational science, where you can edit and run code examples straight away—no need to configure environments, download datasets, or rely on networking connection. I call these tutorials labs, and the new app is called Tinkerstellar—because you learn by tinkering with things! 😅

Tinkerstellar is now in public beta, so feel free to join the TestFlight using the link below and play around. This first version has four labs that you can install and experiment with. They range in topics from general coding to tackling some real-world problems of computational science. Most importantly, please let me know if you find any issues, if some things don’t make sense, or if there is a feature you think is missing—open an issue in the bug tracker, or reach out to [email protected].

I am looking for suggestions on what topics to cover in future labs; but even more importantly, I am looking for educators who would like to collaborate and publish their tutorials in Tinkerstellar. Preparing labs is super-easy, as they are all based on (you’ve guessed it) Jupyter notebooks. Your labs will be available for free to everyone with an iPad, and everything you provide will have proper attributions and your name on it, of course.

Tinkerstellar will be coming to App Store later this year as a free app, and all labs will be available for free, too. You can install it on your iPad right now using one of the links below:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z2vhNox7

OR

Go to tinkerstellar.com and select Join TestFlight beta

How did I manage to get a .com domain for the app, you might ask? With a really weird app name, that’s how.

What about Juno apps?

Juno apps are not going anywhere, of course: I have recently pushed several important updates to both, and have a few ambitious things planned for them in the near future. Juno Connect now integrates with NAAS.ai, and also features somewhat experimental integrations with Paperspace Gradient and AWS SageMaker—these integrations may not be completely seamless, but if you do use Juno Connect with SageMaker or Gradient, things should be much, much easier now. Juno’s list of supported libraries keeps growing with recent additions of LXML, Pillow, Cryptography, Cvxopt, Statsmodels, Regex and others, and will soon feature GDAL and other geospatial tools. I am also working on the new design for notebook editor in Juno, which will set it apart from the one in Juno Connect. Bokeh is not only available in Juno, but also works beautifully with a touch screen (seriously, give it a go!).

I am really excited with the latest addition to the family of Juno apps, and truly, honestly hope you will find Tinkerstellar useful. 🚀