From the Forum — Issue #53

02 January 2015

From the Forum — Issue #53

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. Push notification modus operandi

Getting your users to respond to specific app behavior can be integral to your app’s success. Using a push notification is one of the simple and user-friendly methods to communicate with a user with little overhead, and it’s always important to determine the workflow of user interaction with that notification, and how your app should act during each.

One Corona developer was wondering out loud in the forum about what, when and where a push notification behaves depending on certain user criteria. Corona Labs support engineer and tutorial wizard Rob Miracle weighed in with the different ways that a push notification can be thrown and when your app can react to a user interacting with that notification.

Head down to the original thread to get a leg up on push notifications and when your Corona-built app can respond to a user-initiated action. Have a question or a comment? Toss it in and we’ll have at it!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53613-determinate-whether-push-notification-was-just-received-or-tapped-on/

2. Keep your text object from Markup misbehavior

Hyperlinks are ubiquitous when it comes to web development. There’s no need to dispute that, but their importance in game and app development can decrease, depending on what is being achieved. Sign language app for real-time translation? Running to the ‘net might not serve you well. Boxing technique wiki-tionary? Links out to video of the punches and parrys would greatly lessen the size of the app on download.

But what’s the best way to get your hyperlinked text in your Corona project? Should you just use a display.newText object and set a touch listener for each one? A useful strategy, but could cause quite a bit of overhead, depending on the amount of links you want to include. A Corona developer opined in the forum on the best way to accomplish this, and distinguished Corona developer RoamingGamer shared his own, really cool module that converts HTML markup language to newText objects. It’s pretty nifty, and up on github for the Corona community to use.

Check out the original thread to get the low-down on this module. By the way, those are two winners as far as app development are concerned: first person to get those out in the market get’s the brass ring!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53604-hyperlinks-in-multiline-displaynewtext

3. Blurring in real-time

The hits just keep on coming from Corona developer Rene Aye. After sharing their 2D Shadow module in an earlier “From the Forum”, they weren’t content to rest on their laurels, and have come blasting out of the gate with another winner: real-time blurring logic for display objects in Corona SDK. Head down to the original thread to check out the code, and don’t forget to say thanks!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53578-realtime-blur-effect

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!