Front and Back Scripts on Mobile

[Richard Gaskin]

Ralph DiMola wrote:

 > In the beginning all this fuss to make a mobile scroller got LC
 > mobile off the ground, but it seems to me that it's time to fold
 > it into the LC field object.

The field part of it seems finally underway - that was the last of the 
stretch goals for the latest crowd funding, at $65,205 pledged of 
$55,000 goal.
<https://livecode.com/project/infinite-livecode/>

Or $15,016 of $15,000, depending on which page you happened to have 
stumbled across (seems kinda confusing to me, but at least both exceeded 
their goals):
<https://livecode.com/project/infinite-livecode-native-field-object/>

Just a shame to see it outstanding so long given that with just a few 
hours' work all of us had a very xTalk workflow in place on our own - 
everyone except newcomers not yet committed to the platform. :(  Oh 
well, better late than never.

One thing I'm not clear on about the new mobile-savvy field:  will it 
provide styled text on mobile?

I see so few mobile apps that support styled editable text that I'm not 
even sure if that's provided by the OS APIs or those devs rolled their 
own text engine.  But if the former it would be super-cool to have 
options for styled text in some of our apps.

Fields aside, there are still other areas where perhaps the community 
might pull together a best-of library for mobile support.

For example, the pinch-to-zoom Lesson doesn't really work well, but 
there's a stack in the forums that's much better.  And things like 
long-press, though not hard to script, would be welcome for newcomers 
getting started.  And factoring mobile-specific language elements so 
they don't throw errors when working on the desktop, etc.

And then there's testing.  Lots that can be done there.  I have error 
handlers in my test builds that might be handy, and I very rarely make 
test builds of the app per se at all - I made one app with all features 
enabled, and it downloads a menu stack from my server in which each 
button downloads an app I'm working on.  In the IDE I have a one-button 
plugin that SCPs the stack file I'm working on to my server, and before 
I can pick up my phone to launch my launcher app it's uploaded and 
ready, just a click away (didn't take more than a few minutes in an 
emulator to realize that just won't work out, waaaaay to slow, makes me 
wonder how other app devs deal with working in toolkits that don't make 
streaming apps a one-liner).

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com