From the Forum — Issue #82

24 July 2015

From the Forum — Issue #82

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. Cycling code times 3

First up is a real-life example of why the Corona developer community is one of the best on all the interwebs. One developer had a question about a simple mechanic, cycling through a set of images, using both forward and backward directions. Nothing too involved, but Corona developers came out in force to provide some pretty useful code snippets.

No less than 3 developers posted code for the original poster to use. It was a quality show of support, and the best part of it is that, we can all benefit from their generosity. It’s also a great test case for starting out on image movement, and if you’re just getting into Corona development, it’s a great place to start. So head on down to the original thread to see this code in action!

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58022-cycling-through-a-list-of-objects-with-arrow-buttons/

2. Windows users, you can now natively type! The future is now!

Getting around the differences between the Corona simulator on Windows or Mac can be a bit daunting. The restrictions that exist on Windows makes having both be identical a fool’s errand. One of the biggest discrepancies is the lack of native.newTextField/Box support on Windows platforms.

To solve this, RoamingGamer comes in to give us a heck of a tip: emulating native.newText entry for debugging on Windows Simulators. Now, this is a workaround/modification that isn’t built into the normal Simulator. This is going to be something that you add on, so that you can test your textboxes on Windows, similar to the functionality on Mac OS X.

It’s still in closed beta at this point, but I wanted to point to the original thread so that everyone can keep an eye on further developments. Hit that Follow button right now!

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58141-nativenewtextfield-for-windows/

3. Processing speeds and steady performance

Now that Corona has opened up their Win32 and Mac OS X betas to the development community at large, we are going to see a lot of different exploratory discussions about whether Corona can do this, or if Lua is suitable for that. I personally think this is a great situation to be in, because it lets us (and the Corona engineers) kick the tires and stretch the bounds of what Corona can do.

A bit of a disclaimer: I made a terrible joke in this thread, which didn’t go over very well, nor did it even really make that much sense. But the point here, is that a developer had a question about the best possible ways to squeeze every last processing millimeter out of Corona SDK, and our friendly neighborhood Lua aficionado StarCrunch rode in and laid down some knowledge.

The conversation gets specific quickly, but it has some great reference information for how one can achieve blazing speed while employing the front-end development simplicity of Corona SDK. The original thread is right there, so go ahead and check it out.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58093-processing-speeds/

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 Segreta on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Amazon devices.