From the Forum — Issue #22

30 May 2014

From the Forum — Issue #22

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. App size and performance

Keeping app sizes low and maintaining peak performance is can be considered the holy grail of app development. Code optimization is a great way to achieve a smaller app size in megabytes, but the largest files are often the art assets.

Apple runs their own image compression software against apps submitted to their store, but it never hurts to use some shrinking software on our own, before submitting to any app store. It’s a delicate dance, and there are some quality tips included in the below form post on condensing your image assets.

Click through to the original link to get a better glimpse into how to lower the size of your images and keep your app size as small as possible.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/47196-know-app-size-prior-to-publishing/#entry243796

2. Object Oriented Programming closures

We’re going deep into Lua OOP discussions here: A curious developer was inquiring as to whether it was possible to generate functional closures that would work in the same way that self: variables calls work for referenced functions.

Head down to the link to get some tips on anonymous OOP closures and the best way to create references to them. Have a tip? Throw it in!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/46870-oop-runtime-and-system-events/#entry247686

3. App name localization

Bringing our apps and games to the masses is the prime motive behind our passion. Making sure that we reach as many continents and empower as many people to download and understand our releases should be our top priority.

Getting the titles of our apps to be translatable to as many languages as possible helps us meet this goal. Depending on your level of skill as a developer, or the platform for which you are developing, different solutions abound. Fortunately, Corona Labs developer @batgirl717111 created a nice tutorial quite a while ago, and in the interests of educating a new crop of developers, I wanted to feature it here.

Fly over to the original thread to find out the exact way to localize your app names. Have a better idea? Feel free to share!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/38972-does-corona-support-app-name-localization/

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!