developing for mobile devices

[Christophe Leske]

Am 02.11.2012 01:18, schrieb Colin Holgate:
> Well, these are early days still. A lot of the inconsistencies are where you either have to simulate the native appearance using LiveCode controls and tricks, or you talk to the OS and get native controls. Eventually they will probably allow access to all of the native controls.

Ok, so what I am now after would be ideally a table with all available 
UI elements on iOS (by iOS version number), and how to invoke these (if 
possible) in LC.

Is there such thing? If not,  should we build one (by "we" I mean people 
on this list).

I can do the "building" part (putting together the table - screenshots 
of the elements and how to get them), but I definetely would need help 
for the programming part of things, as I don't know how to invoke these.

When you debug your iOS applications - do you do this mainly in LC 
itself, in the iOS simulator, or the real physical device?


> When do you have to write your book review by? Will it just appear in Germany?
There was no timeframe. I am done with it though, and wanted to write 
the review this weekend.

The book itself is pretty complete (for its compact amount of pages), 
and well structured.
It is however not aimed at the absolute beginner. It does give you a 
good overview on how to get a testing and debugging enivronment set up, 
but no in-depth introduction to LiveCode and which commands are 
generally available, and then available or useable on iOS/Android.

It is a head first introduction to mobile development. It is definetely 
better than no book at all, but left me (a beginner in LC) with a lot of 
questions (namely on how to invoke all the other UI elements in iOS not 
mentioned in the text, and how to configure them).

I will contact Kraig - my understanding was that I am supposed to write 
the review and hand it to him? And/or eventually publish it on Amazon.

I would give it a 4 out of 5 stars - the structure of it is excellent 
(step by step instructions, general layout structure for each chapter, 
screenshots, lots of additional links, etc), yet there could be a bit 
more information and content in it... :-)

I could have read on after the last chapter about more advanced 
techniques like XML parsing for instance, or database connectivity, or 
network testing, or scrolling content panes...

But this is more related to custom extensions (and how to work with 
them) instead of LC itself, i give you that. Then again, this is how 
mobile development works for the time being, and therefore should be 
part of the book.

To put it otherwise:
the book teaches you about the "how" part of mobile development 
"know-how", yet not (enough) about the "know" part of it. MobGUI is 
mentioned, as well as mergExt, yet not how to work with the most 
important ones of these...

One of the main disappointments after having bought my LC license was 
indeed to learn, that for most of the parts I am NOT invoking original 
UI widgets, but am mostly "recreating" them from identically looking 
graphics  - this complicates if not prohibits the creation of 
multi-language applications.

Also, no word on how to create unified apps for the iPhone and iPad (by 
the way, any info on that available somehwere? I reckon it needs at 
least two main stacks for the different screen sizes and layouts?).

And finally:
if you add an lcext to your project, won't LiveCode complain about new 
command words it cannot understand that you put into the code in order 
to invoke the functions in the extensions? I am an old time Director 
user, and Lingo would always complain if it would encounter a command in 
lingo it couldn't figure out.

Long post, I know, but I must go for the rest of the day,

-- 
Christophe Leske
multimedial.de

----------------------------------------
PROFILE: www.linkedin.com/in/multimedial
----------------------------------------
www.multimedial.de - info at multimedial.de
Hohler Str. 17 - 51645 Gummersbach
+49(0)2261-99824540 // +49(0)177-2497031
----------------------------------------