Controls on mobile apps - am I missing something?

[Mike Kerner]

Spend the money and buy tmControls from Scott Rossi.  Every app I have
written is skinned the way I want it, and when I want something a little
different, I'm able to customize them as I choose.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
wrote:

> Ben Rubinstein wrote:
>
> > My previous mobile app dabbling had involved entirely custom
> > interfaces. Now I'm trying to create a more straightforward app
> > with a more conventional interface - and I'm getting a horrible
> > dichotomy between the widgets (header bar, navigation bar, switch
> > control, segmented control) and the traditional controls (radio
> > buttons, sliders, progress bars, etc).  The latter look fine
> > on Mac; but on iOS, they've gone back to Motif, which is to say
> > several decades.
>
> iOS does not contain the APIs to render Mac controls, so LC defaults to
> its built-in Motif emulation.
>
> Most desktop controls are unsuitable for use on mobile anyway, so using
> the types of mobile controls users are accustomed to is a better bet.
>
> Buttons are buttons, of course, and you can get very good appearances by
> just changing the style to rectangle or roundRect, with whatever background
> and hilite colors compliment your app's appearance.
>
> Radio control take up too much space on small devices.  More commonly pick
> lists are used, and LC provides commands to instantiate OS-native pick
> lists on mobile.
>
> The closest fit for a radio control on mobile might be an option control,
> which is what I use as the on-screen control the user clicks to bring up
> the pick list.
>
> For those, and editable fields and scrollers, it took me about 10 minutes
> to find the process of scripting the instantiation of their mobile-native
> counterparts tedious to the point of feeling silly.  So instead I wrote a
> backscript that catches preOpenCard to do my instantiation for me.
>
> My lib examines the controls on the card and then calls
> mobileControlCreate as needed, making editable text fields, scroll
> interaction overlays, etc. as needed.
>
> Once I figured out that scrollers for fields are actually MUCH simpler
> than the LC Lesson for that suggests, getting the basic functionality in
> place took just a couple hours.  In fact, given how liberating it is to be
> able to use LiveCode objects on the desktop and have a lib automatically
> take care of replacing them with their mobile-native counterparts, even
> mapping relevant messages between them so I don't need to write as much
> platform-forked code, I've been surprised this isn't included with LC
> itself.
>
> I'm still making lots of changes to my lib as I work toward deployment, so
> it's not yet in a sharable state.  When it is I mkay dual-license it, but I
> hope by then LC will just have something like this in the install; most
> devs I've talked to have already written their own variants of this, and
> like most things the code isn't the hard parts, it's designing how it
> should work.  Maybe one of the many others in our community is already
> shared and usable....
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
>
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