From The Forum — Issue #14

04 April 2014

From The Forum — Issue #14

Welcome to the latest 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. New IDE? Yes please!

I’ve been guilty of coding in the dark ages, using only a simple text editor and the Corona Simulator to develop my apps. However, the more advanced among us have moved onto IDEs like the Corona Editor, Glider, and Outlaw that grant greater control over our code and features integrated tools and many bells and whistles.

Enter ZeroBrane Studio IDE. This is a new IDE focusing specifically on Lua with special consideration to Corona, and it boasts several novel features like on-device debugging. Written in Lua, it’s yet another smart tool which helps us develop and test rapidly without the “hiccups” of straight text editing. So, float over to the original thread and check out this new IDE!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45608-zerobrane-studio-lua-ide-v050-is-out-with-updated-corona-api-for-v20142189/

2. Hunting and gathering in the digital age

Interacting with complex body physics in Box2D has always been a challenge. Volumes have been written discussing how to implement abstract “bridge” math in Box2D and allowing all objects to work together in harmony.

One Corona developer wanted to know how best to achieve “spear” physics logic with Box2D, where the operational idea is that the object has three elements: the shaft, the spearhead, and the high-density “bead” at the tip of the spearhead. The famous horacebury, creator of the indispensable mathlib.lua library, has put together some interesting demos showing how this type of physics simulation can be achieved in Corona.

Fly over to the original thread and see “how the spear flies” and learn how to surmount perceived Box2D limitations within Corona.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45292-how-to-throw-a-spear/

3. Any color in the rainbow? Not just a dream!

Giving gifts makes everyone happy. Whether you’re doing it anonymously or handing a wrapped present to a lucky recipient, we all enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling of making someone else happy.

Developer jasonschroeder has created a couple of very interesting and useful modules which we can implement in our apps. The first, a color picker module, allows us to include a scalable palette option to configure the color of objects. The second is a finger paint library which can be used in countless ways, from markup business apps to painting games for kids.

Swing over to the original threads, pick up the code samples, and don’t forget to say “thanks!”.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45789-color-picker-library-add-a-color-picker-to-your-app-with-just-one-line-of-code/#entry238881

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/45690-finger-paint-libarary-add-finger-painting-to-your-app-with-just-one-line-of-code/

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!