14 August 2015
From the Forum — Issue #85
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. The new hotness in embossed text
One of the easiest APIs for new developers to learn is the display.newText() function. Populating and manipulating text is immediate, and since the text objects created behave like display objects, they can be modified and acted upon like any other object within Corona.
The logical transition to going to new font styles, and the display.newEmbossedText() API delivers there. However, the embossed text has some limitations, specifically an inability to fade out to transparency. I always found it kind of annoying, and a Corona developer devised a way to use snapshots to create the outlined text effect. Instead of using the newEmbossedText() API, you can substitute for the below library, and start fading today!
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58457-free-outlined-text-module-via-snapshotsoverdraw
2. The hottest topic: Keeping your users safe
It’s an interesting situation that brings new users to your app. They want to have an enjoyable experience, and in doing so, there needs to be a handshake of sorts, an agreement between the developer and the user. We don’t want your private data for our own individual gain; we want you to be able to trust the game you’re playing, so that you can invest your most valuable commodity: Your free time.
There have been a lot of discussions about user security around the Corona developer campfire these days, and I wanted to highlight one discussion that took place in the forums, because it was a robust solution that had concrete beginning and end points for implementation. While some might think it’s overkill, the suggestions in the thread serve to underline the fact that, where user security is involved, there should be serious thought paid to the solution implemented. Head on down to the original thread and see if the solutions will work for you.
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58414-how-safe-are-credentials-within-the-app/
3. The versatility of Corona plugins written in native Lua
We all have our favorite repositories and libraries that we always incorporate into our projects from the outset. Whether they are data saving modules, font mitigation or a simple modified version of a tableview widget, having your toolbox full of useful snippets that make your life easier, should be what we all strive for.
Corona wants to help us get the most useful, popular code into our projects, giving us the blueprint to generate plugins written in naive Lua, and going the extra mile of hosting them on their build servers, so that your they can be added to your project at the time that it’s compiled. The benefits extensive, and have been extolled at length in some recent blog posts. I wanted to highlight the below thread, because it deals with how you can create your own plugins with a modicum of obfuscation, that you can use for your own purposes. This goes hand in hand with the above forum post, so grab your best friend and head down to the original thread for more info!
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.
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