Making an iOS app look like one

[Andrew at MidWest Coast Media]

>  -  Fields to display information, some of which must allow input via keyboard or pasting. Although there is a Native Android Field widget, there isn?t one for iOS, so I don?t know what my options are. I want the kind of fonts and font sizes that are typical of iOS, but so far I haven?t found a reference to these properties in the LC documentation. I found a command, mobileControlCreate, which it appears can only function dynamically in a mobile app, which seems to mean I can?t create and place controls until the app is running. I find that confusing.

No native iOS field yet, and hopefully a “mobile field” widget that is more cross-platform gets added at some point. For now what I do is use standard fields and add the mobileControl options to basically create native mobile fields over top of your standard fields and pass the information back and forth using mobileControlGet and mobileControlSet. This let’s me test in the IDE w/o compiling for device as often.

http://lessons.livecode.com/m/4069/l/29112-how-do-i-use-native-text-controls-on-mobile

>  -  Small, tidy icons, for use as the equivalent of menus or menu items, for example acting as links to various settings cards - so typically an image like a cogwheel for example. I would like these to be SVG, but none of LC?s SVG images have the necessary unchunky look. Do I have to create them from scratch (it would not be the end of the world if I did, but I imagine that there?s a library of them somewhere).

The SVGs in the current library are FontAwesome 4. They were good at the time, but are outdated now with the release of 5.13.0 (which includes COVID icons). I lucked out and bought a lifetime license when they ran a Kickstarter campaign a couple years ago which gives greater access, but even the free options are decent.

>  -  ?Done? type buttons (there is a built in widget for this but it doesn?t end up looking like the ?done? buttons I see on typical apps) and other buttons to start off processes or displays.

There is a widget pack to help with this, but I’ve always just made my own option that skirted the HID requirements of both major app stores without fully adhering or breaking them (of all the times my apps have been rejected it has NEVER been from native interface issues). Scott Rossi has some amazing assets to help with this.

http://tactilemedia.com/blog/2018/05/12/blasts-from-the-past/

>  -  Some kind of control that acts like a radio button group, so that one option is chosen to the exclusion of any others in the group (I suppose it?s a picking list, but I don?t know how to implement such a thing in an iOS-compatible way and the widgets on offer are specialised to date and time)

After skinning them, radio buttons should act the same in mobile as they do on desktop since you aren’t using a native solution.

https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?t=22169 <https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?t=22169>

> 
> 
—Andrew Bell