From the Forum — Issue #43

24 October 2014

From the Forum — Issue #43

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. Widgets Town, open for business!

Many of our Corona development community are bona-fide success stories. Forging ahead and leading with some truly inventive mobile apps makes us realize that with a lot of ingenuity and hard work, we can show the world what we’re made of.

Ending with a preposition might be the most ironic way to introduce greatness, but the folks behind WidgetsTown are really embarking on a journey of enlightenment here. They are forging ahead with a website offering themes and tips for getting widgets to work just the way you want them. With the open-sourced widget model we have at our disposal, we have the power to make changes for the better!

Head down to the original thread and take a look at the new options on display. Have a question or a concern? That’s what the forum is all about m’friend!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51858-widgets-town-themes/

2. WebView with some razzle dazzle

We see some pretty cool solutions being presented in the forums these days. Whether it’s folks working with physics target mapping, some backend server logic or messing with the pew-pews, we see nifty moves from the community.

One interesting query comes from a developer with some questions about WebView properties and actions to open windows in his app. Developer dave.haynes found an intelligent way to get external HTML pages to be selectively initialized based on string values. It’s a snippet of code that can be extremely useful for many different applications.

Check out the original thread to read the code in question. Have a concern or your own way of handling this? Feel free to add it in.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/51826-webview-opening-a-new-window/

3. Sorting tables and the ease of iterating

We’re taking it back to the proverbial crates with this tip! One of the most functional aspects of Lua is the fact that we can throw our values and variables in a table and run (or iterate) through it to find the variable or value that you need.

Developers whom are a bit newer to the Corona SDK party may not be intimately familiar with the table.sort function, but it’s such a versatile API with low overhead, allowing us to fill up a table in any order you like, and then sort that table in whichever manner you see fit. Once you get the handle of it, it’ll be an indispensable tool in your tool belt when you’re building any app or game you can imagine.

Sounds too good to be true? Don’t just take my word for it. Head down to the original thread to see the function in action!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/52069-how-to-detect-lower-element-from-a-table/

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!