From the Forum — Issue #99

From the Forum — Issue #99

From the ForumWelcome 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!


The start of the Corona-powered Internet of Things

Starting off this week’s installment strong with another hearty offering from Develephant. Building off of his strong ACE stack that we previously highlighted, he comes busting out of the gates with a first-rounder winner, by creating a way for Corona-developed apps to communicate with Raspberry Pi-powered devices.

As far as I’m concerned, this is tantamount to obtaining a new.platform for development, and all of the new markets that entails. Good on ya, Develephant, and for the rest of us plebeians, head on down to the original thread to get yourself a slice if that IoC goodness.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/60165-control-raspberry-pi-with-corona-sdk-ace-pi

When do you use what you use for what?

Corona has a lot of useful APIs that make developing for mobile devices much, much easier. Detecting the device size and scaling objects accordingly is one of the best magic tricks that you can find in the SDK, as it takes a good amount of the heavy lifting out of your development equation.

The only problem is that, it can be a bit difficult to understand when to use which API when attempting to position your objects, in terms of device size. A Corona developer was recently grappling with this very conversation, and posted their inquiry. Corona support engineer Rob Miracle saw that and dropped some science in the thread regarding best practices for the various “height” APIs.

Check out the original thread below to study up on the proper usage of each.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/60131-display-contentheight-vs-actualcontentheight-vs-viewablecontentheight/

Disable auto-correct in textfields

There’s no denying that Corona enables us to create games at a significantly increased pace than the vast majority of other SDKs in existence. But, it also let’s us build some really interesting business apps.

I’ve seen a large amount of productivity-minded apps, developed with Corona, release into the app stores lately, and they are all impressive with the level of complexity they are able to achieve with the SDK product, especially when you start adding native textfields to the mix. The fact that textfields are set to auto-correct can be pretty infuriating, but now, an intrepid Corona developer has made a library available to the community that disables the auto-correct feature.

This can be very useful in some cases, so head on down to the original thread to check out this nifty trick in action!

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53399-newtextfield-not-autocorrecting

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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