From the Forum — Issue #68

17 April 2015

From the Forum — Issue #68

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. iOS design just got simplier

Generating our UI icons is always a pain. Sizes, vector versus pixel, getting the right sheen on the lensflare… there is a lot to do in a little amount of time. Anything that takes the sting out of the research and the creation of our buttons and tabs is worth checking out.

On to the the thread below, which talks about a cool website which has copies of iOS button templates, which mirror the Apple design philosophy perfectly. It seems there might be a reason for that. Head down to the original thread and check it out. It’s a dynamite resource and you would be doing a disservice in ignoring it!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/56156-ios-8-icons/

2. Text on Windows? A workaround for the rest of us

If your main development machine runs Windows, come to the front of the class and show off your behemoth of a laptop or plain black box of a desktop. Corona on Windows works very very well, but we do miss out on some cool features that OSX users have been enjoying for quite some time.

One of these things is text input. Corona can run text fields on OSX, and they support keyboard inputs and generally allow you to debug text entry inside of the simulator. Windows can’t handle this natively which is a shortcoming of Microsoft, but there are a lot of folks that want this featureset anyway. And so it was that some intrepid developers were able to create a worthwhile alternative in the original thread below. Head on over to check it out of you’re itching for this functionality on your Windows machine!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/56160-windows-simulator-text-input/

3. I got you.. diagonally!

Scrollviews have been an integral part of the widget library since it’s inception. Giving developers a nice option when it comes to a simple list, extending the widget functionality is sometimes necessary. As a recent developer found, diagonal scrolling isn’t enabled out-of-box, so they took it upon themselves to make up a nice edit from the open-source library, and shared it with the class!

Feel free to check it out in the link below. It also provides the link to the original widget library, so if you’re hankering to get under the hood and get your hands dirty on a Corona-approved (but not supported!) open-source library then this is the one for you!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/56034-diagonal-scrollview-widget/

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Interactive, 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: @pancinteractive. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!