At this point, what's the shortest path to an iOS/Android app?

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

Geoff

IMHO your shortest path will be

a) forget about fully responsive, in terms of trying to emulate  html5 web design. IMHO this whole "must be responsive" is a huge sidetrack from content development…someone spends days and days and ends up with a few pix and a little bit of text and "it's so cool… yeah.. it shrinks and expand so beautifully!" but nothing of substance. You will do better focusing on the game, content and game play UX instead of wasting time dealing with "on resize…" 

b) most games we are seeing on mobile are fixed to one orientation. This way you can "go crazy" with your design and not worry about "what happens if the user turns their phone sideways (or upright)"  .e.g. even apple does not respond to orientation change in it settings module. Monument Valley (awesomely beautiful) is portrait only… period. other games are landscape only. period.

c) once you accept the above, they you are good to go with 


on preopenstack
   wait 200 milliseconds with messages
   set the fullscreenmode of this stack to "showAll"
end preopenstack

and your stack *will* be responsive for the screen size, assuming you 

a) work in the "safe zone" 
b) are willing to accept some letter boxing.
c) or just use a large background and then on some screens all your significant content will be constrained to the central horizontal safe zone (on landscape) or vertical (on portrait)   but still look lovely.

depending on the kinds of controls and overall look you may find one of these others works for you

set the fullscreenmode of stack to {empty|"exactFit"|"letterbox"|"noBorder"|"noScale"|"showAll"}

Each of these has its own caveats, I'm most familiar with showAll, but I think Randy is using exactFit… 
I hope others jump in here to discuss the differences/options.. 

But the above is, I think the fastest way to get to where you want to be without messing with responsive geometry.  

Of course I can hear some who will jump in and say  "it's not that hard to roll your own." True, but depends on how many hours you want to put in on "resize stack" when that same mental re-estate could be going to building the game play? If you lock into portrait (or landscape), set a background image/grc to 1024 X 1024  and center that… but make your stack  736 X 414  (or 414 X 736) you and use fullscreenMode ShowAll, you can be deploying successfully to pretty much any device in 30 minutes… 

in the end there's no way around iterations, test, deploy on device(s) and try again.

just two mangos from Hawaii…




On 12/15/17, 11:00 AM, "use-livecode on behalf of Geoff Canyon via use-livecode" <use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com on behalf of use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

    Is there a ready-made shell that people prefer that I should copy the
    elements of the app into? Or is there a mobile-specific library that I
    should be copying into the app?
    
    What do people prefer to use at this point?