breakdown of my book (LiveCode Mobile Development)...

[Colin Holgate]

I see that B&N have my book listed as being available on August 3rd. Amazon still shows it as September 2nd, but the publisher only just decided to bring it forward by a month, presumably Amazon's date will change. I was going to hold off describing the book until I knew exact dates, but as it's the weekend, and we have topics going on about books at the moment, I may as well do this now.

I don't know if you can imagine this problem, but in general it doesn't take up much space to describe how you would do things in LiveCode, and the brief for this book said that it should be 200-300 pages. Ponder that for a moment, how would you fill out all those pages? Screenshots help, some of those LiveCode dialogs are pretty big!

Before even getting the job I had to write up an outline of all of the chapters, giving page number estimates. I would think about the topic, guess how many pages it would take to talk about that, and then I would double the number! Still it didn't add up to much, so I doubled it again! My estimate was over 200 pages, but I had no real ida what I was actually going to write, and in some cases I didn't even know the topic I was going to describe. As it happens, in the end (including the index and "intentionally blank pages") the book is 235 pages.

I didn't want to describe things slowly, or just use big words, so the approach I took was to describe several aspects of the groundwork you might do in achieving the main task in the chapter, leading up to using that knowledge in tackling the main example in the chapter.

It does mean though that at least half of the book is talking about things that don't have to relate to mobile, but wherever possible I would use mobile features in conduction with non-mobile techniques, to at least make it slightly relevant to the book!

There isn't anything in the book that you couldn't find by searching in Google, or asking questions here, but it did take a good amount of time to track down some of the information. I will hope that anyone who gets the book will save enough time to justify the cost. Just think of it as you buying me lunch!

Each chapter starts with a few bullet points that list the things to be covered in that chapter. Other things will still be covered, but it's a good indication of the main things covered. Here is a list of those entries from all of the chapters, along with the chapter title:

Chapter 1 - LiveCode Fundamentals

	• ‹  Become familiar with the LiveCode environment
	• ‹  Investigate the hierarchy of a LiveCode "stack"
	• ‹  Create a simple calculator application
	• ‹  Learn about the many different interface controls 

Chapter 2 - Getting Started with LiveCode Mobile

	• ‹  Sign up for Android Market
	• ‹  Sign up for Amazon Appstore
	• ‹  Download and install the Android SDK
	• ‹  Configure LiveCode so that it knows where to look for the Android SDK
	• ‹  Become an iOS developer with Apple
	• ‹  Download and install Xcode
	• ‹  Configure LiveCode so that it knows where to look for the iOS SDKs
	• ‹  Set up simulators and physical devices
	• ‹  Test a stack in a simulator and physical device

Chapter 3 - Building User Interfaces

	• ‹  Set up a "test bed" mobile application
	• ‹  Open e-mail and browser windows
	• ‹  Show a date picker control
	• ‹  Load pictures from the library and camera
	• ‹  Make an iOS looking button
	• ‹  Manually lay out an interface
	• ‹  Use code to lay out an interface
	• ‹  Look at a powerful mobile interface controls add-on

Chapter 4 - Using Remote Data and Media

	• ‹  Look at the various ways a stack might be structured
	• ‹  Think about where code should go
	• ‹  Write to and read from external text files
	• ‹  Create a scrapbook-like app for remembering interesting Internet based media files

Chapter 5 - Making a Jigsaw Puzzle Application

	• ‹  Examine the way that LiveCode stores bitmap data in an image object
	• ‹  Find a way to use a single bitmap in place of 50 buttons
	• ‹  Make a collision detection map
	• ‹  Create a jigsaw puzzle app that takes advantage of several mobile device features

Chapter 6 - Making a Reminder Application

	• ‹  Discuss what is meant by a "reminder"
	• ‹  Create some time-measuring utility functions
	• ‹  Define a data structure for storing information about an event
	• ‹  Make use of mobile device "notifications"
	• ‹  Create a flexible reminders app

Chapter 7 - Deploying to Your Device

	• ‹  Examine all the Standalone Application Settings options that relate to creating mobile apps
	• ‹  Create builds of an app so that it can be sent to beta testers
	• ‹  Build a final distribution version of an app
	• ‹  Review how to upload apps to the iOS App Store, Amazon AppStore, and Google Play

Appendix - Extending LiveCode

No bullet list in this chapter, but I list some add-ons that are of use in mobile development, including MobGUI, tmControl, DropTools, mergExt, and also show some links to articles on getting started with your own custom controls and external commands.