First App rejected for odd reasons

[Thomas McGrath III]

Mark,

At first I wanted to object to the need for JPEG only for large images as all of the research that I have done (especially concerning transparency issues) has told me to never use JPEG (except for the web) in most of my apps but then I realized that I have not tested those same results for iOS and Android engines, so I will need to do those tests again to verify/reject my findings. That said, using 2048 png's with transparency layers on fourteen cards with special visual effects and playing song files on one channel and a voice over on another channel did not slow down either the logic code or the effects code. I created a Ken Burns effect in LC and it runs as smoothly with the larger images as it does with smaller variations. So I'm not sure what would constitute a stack being 'much larger' than it needs to be - in my first case it was the main stack that was large and now it is the images folder that is large - either way the download is going to be the same size and be too big for cellular download (which is why I believe Apple has that warning in the first place.) I would not think that 14 retina sized images on 14 different cards is too large for a mobile app and that instead they must be referenced and that that would be a requirement. Normally I think if it was like 50 images it should be referenced but not just 14. Most LC projects I have seen all use lower quality images or regular 1024 images enlarged for retina via code, but they are definitely not retina images.

All of that said, I think what you stated is spot on and should be included in a best practices type document somewhere for mobile development. Maybe with some recommendations for audio and compression comparisons.

Thanks,

Tom

-- Tom McGrath III
http://lazyriver.on-rev.com
mcgrath3 at mac.com

On Jun 5, 2013, at 5:21 AM, Mark Wilcox <m_p_wilcox at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>>> I may be wrong about this (can anyone verify?), but if you're building for iOS 5 or later, you should be perfectly safe selecting armv7 only and building for that, since any devices capable of running iOS 5 and above are armv7 devices only.
> 
> 
> Yes, this is correct and a good idea - the iPhone 3G was the last device to have an ARMv6 processor and that can only run iOS 4.3 or earlier - that's why Apple has dropped support for armv6 builds from the more recent Xcode versions.
> 
> I expect (really hope) that LiveCode only duplicates the engine code within the Universal binary and puts the main stack in a data section that is shared by both code variants - if that's the case, this might only save you a few megabytes of engine code, but you should do it anyway - iOS5+ with armv6 is pure waste.
> 
> I'd not seen the main executable size issue before and a quick Google suggests both this and the not yet mandatory PIE warning are new.  This is either a subtle crackdown on low quality apps produced by tools other than XCode or there are some new products or tools on the way which will care about this in the future.  I'll bring it up on the engine forum.
> 
> As I understand it, only the main stack is actually bundled inside the executable in a standalone, so a simple fix would be to create a launcher stack as your main stack which simply loads the previous main stack which you can include in the bundle separately.  However, creating apps much, much larger than they need to be is not friendly to your users.  Large images should be JPEG compressed - if they contain text that loses quality due to JPEG compression then split the images up (or if it's all text, store it as text not an image!).  Audio should also be in a suitable compressed format (i.e. not WAV).
> 
> In this case it sounds like LiveCode 6's application browser might be handy for finding out what's actually inside the stack easily, then removing all the media and referencing it externally.  Otherwise it might be easier to rebuild the stack by copying the scripts across into a new one that only references external media from the start?
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Chris Sheffield <cmsheffield at icloud.com>
> To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> 
> Sent: Monday, 3 June 2013, 20:54
> Subject: Re: First App rejected for odd reasons
> 
> 
> Another thought. In the standalone settings, are you building a universal binary? I may be wrong about this (can anyone verify?), but if you're building for iOS 5 or later, you should be perfectly safe selecting armv7 only and building for that, since any devices capable of running iOS 5 and above are armv7 devices only. This may also reduce the size of your executable.
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