From the Forum — Issue #12

21 March 2014

From the Forum — Issue #12

Welcome to the twelfth installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.

Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!

1. Insert yourself into the social stream.

I know we’ve talked about Twitter implementations in this space before. You’re probably already thinking that you know the best way to post messages and pictures to the popular social network, but believe me, if you’re not considering some of the suggestions by Corona developer Mpappas, you’re doing yourself a great disservice.

The following thread on posting to Twitter (and Facebook) is easily worth a visit, so hurry over to the original thread and see how just 20 lines of code can make your app social!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/44834-posting-images-within-a-message-post-or-tweet-to-facebook-and-twitter-on-android/

2. North points north, right? Let’s agree on that.

Container groups have been fickle friends of Corona developers since the release of the Graphics 2.0 engine. We want to be as close as possible, go on bike rides, and head to the local art museum. Yet sometimes their capricious ways leave us scratching our heads, wondering where we went wrong.

One of the trickier details is container placement. Even veterans can get tripped up when dropping a child object into a container group. Fortunately, a good discussion on container placement “best practices” is taking place in the following thread. So, if you’re wrestling with containers, head over and explore how to best optimize your container groups and locations.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/44764-containers-and-anchor-points/#entry233892

3. Keep an eye on your code, but don’t get antsy.

ProGuard is a hot topic these days. Listed as a file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscater, and pre-verifier, it seems to be the “Swiss Army Knife” of Android security, as well as the solution for decreasing APK sizes.

However, for Corona SDK users, it doesn’t offer the bounty of features that it does to native Java developers. In the words of Joshua Quick: “all it would do is obfuscate CoronaLabs’ Java code. The main intent of the ProGuard tool is to prevent end-users from reverse-engineering an app’s Java code. ProGuard would do nothing to protect your code which is written in Lua.”

Curious to learn more about ProGuard? Head over to the original thread to pick up some tips!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/39625-proguard-on-pro-version/

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Software, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancsoftware. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!