From the Forum — Issue #40

03 October 2014

From the Forum — Issue #40

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 Launch images

If you’re spent longer than five minutes in the Corona forum, you’ll know that the new iPhones and their new form factors mean some significant changes for those looking to target these devices. And who wouldn’t want to? The increased screen real estate coupled with some serious horsepower expand the limits of what we can do with our apps.

The problem, however, is that the new sizes mean new launch images. A lot of folks have been doing the legwork in figuring out the best configurations, names and sizes of the launch images, so that your apps show up correctly on every device the first time, whether iPhone 5 or iPhone 6+.

Check the below forum posts for info on what is needed for each of the new devices. Have a suggestion or another tip? Let us know!

Editor Note: The Corona SDK Build guide has been updated with the current recommended settings for this.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51457-black-screen-on-launch-with-ios-8-landscape-apps
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51066-screenshots-and-new-iphone-size-compatibility/page-4#entry267331

2. Delay satisfaction on push notifications

It’s a proven fact: push notifications are the key to everlasting life. Well, not really, but they are really useful in our apps and games and make for increased user involvement when used to their potential. Corona makes using push notifications very simple, meaning that many can fold this feature into their games.

However, it’s been floated that many developers are getting their push notification permission requests denied because the request is made before the game or app fully initialized. This means that the user hasn’t even had time to start being involved in the app, and therefore has no incentive to allow push notifications in the first place. A very frustrating problem if there ever was one. I found such a conversation about what to do in the forum link below, with a feature request being posited as a possible resolution. An employee of GameThrive chimed in as well, stating that their service provides delayed push notification permission requests as a new feature.

The below forum link will take you to the magical land of push notification awareness. I need to state for the record that I am not an employee of GameThrive, nor have they paid for any advertising or monetary mentions. I, as always, am your humble forum crawler and want to bring you the most up-to-the-second info I can!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51493-delay-user-request-for-push-notification-permissions-feature-request/

3. And now, some utilities for the people!

Continuing on the Corona SDK altruistic angle, we have a Corona developer who has gifted some of his very own Lua utilities to the masses. Developer stephannvasconcelos has provided the Corona SDK community with some intelligent array logic and allows a developer quick access and loopback for groups of objects.

Check the original thread for the github link and a quick use example. Do yourself a favor and do some experimenting for an easy way to interact with your complicated code.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51478-convenient-utilities-not-included-with-the-standard-lua-install/

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!