LC and mobile development what-not

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Stuart wrote:
> I'm just starting to try my hand at mobile development, using LC 4.6.4.
> (I won't upgrade LC until I see how mobile development goes)
>
> I've read the Android Release Notes for this version of LC and didn't see
> anything about what font name and size to use for a mobile application,
> starting with Android since I'm on Windows.
>
> Font - I used Tahoma and size 14. It's way too small for my HTC Incredible
> phone. What is recommended here? (24 seems OK).
>
> Button size - what size should a button be? Quite large I now know since the
> default size I could hardly see on my device. I tried 50 px. It seems OK.
>
> Table fields - what are the defaults for mobile? What about the scroll bar
> width? What about gesturing on the table control itself to scroll down and
> up? How is that done? Do I set vertical scroll bars at all?
>
> These are just a few of the things I've tried so far.
>
> There must be a document that outlines the mobile platform layout defaults.
> Even better would be the IDE reading the Application Settings and knowing
> there is a mobile platform selected and set the properties palette
> appropriately.


This guide from the Android developer site provides some helpful 
orientation:
<http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html>

As you'll discover, central to managing good layouts in Android is 
knowing the pixel density of the device, and I'm hoping we'll see a 
function for that in a version of the Android engine soon.

Further down the road it would be great to have a means of scaling the 
rendering of both cards and groups, useful for so many things beyond 
mobile development, but for now we need to write these ourselves.

There's some code here that's helpful for scaling:
<http://forums.runrev.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=13085>

Also, Chipp and Ken have been working on a tool to help with this:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-July/175527.html>

It's downloadable here:
<http://www.gadgetplugins.com/altplugins/altMobileResizer.rev>

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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