Android/mobGUI/screen sizes

[Richard Gaskin]

Richard Miller wrote:
> John Craig is apparently not responding to any messages, whether here,
> directly by email, by support ticket, or via the LC forum.

This is one of the reasons I strongly prefer Curry Kenworthy's policy 
with his plugins:  he sells the protected library for a great price, but 
also makes the source available for professional devs for a multiple of 
that price.  With source, Curry could disappear for weeks at a time 
(though thankfully he's always been rapidly available for any email 
support I've needed) and it won't stop us from making modifications our 
clients need.  But without source, if you need to change anything in a 
library you're hosed.

A plea to all third-party devs:  if you want to sell to pros, please 
understand that pros need source.  We'll pay extra for it, but not 
having an option for it will make it impossible to consider using your 
library at all.


> I've been trying to convert a LC ios app (which uses mobGUI) to Android.
> I was hoping I could just add one custom size of 480x800 to the two
> iphone/ipad sizes I had already built for. But after testing at Verizon
> on a few Android devices, I see this won't work. Plus, I asked potential
> customers to send me their phone details, and just looking at the first
> five, I found the following:
>
> 480x800
> 720x1280
> 800x1280
> 600x1024
> 540x960
>
> What a mess.

It's even worse than you think.  On the desktop we commonly see:

1024x600
1024x768
1152x864
1280x768
1280x800
1280x1024
1366x768
1440x900
1600x900
1600x1200
1680x1050
1920x1080
...and more

What a mess indeed. :)

What Steve Jobs liked to call "fragmentation" could just as easily be 
called "diversity".  What's happening with mobile devices offering a 
wide range of choices to customers is no different than what's been 
happening with the desktop for 20 years.

LiveCode offers a resizeStack handler to allow us to adjust the contents 
of our windows to fit whatever device our app is running on at the moment.

I have no idea how MobGUI deals with the choices our audiences have 
available to them, but since there's no source option it's not something 
I've been able to use anyway.

Instead, I've been waiting for more support for native controls, and 
thankfully with each release RunRev has been doing a reasonably good job 
with that.

For anything they don't yet support out of the box, I've had to roll my 
own.  It's a bit of work, but at least I have source.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv