There are over 2,000 programming languages and several that can be used to program mobile applications. LiveCode has proven itself a strong competitor in the mobile application development market. The power of this easy-to-learn programming environment will get you to start developing mobile apps with the very first project.
LiveCode Mobile Development Hotshot is a hands-on guide to developing games and other apps for mobile devices using LiveCode. You will learn tricks and techniques for tackling even the most difficult mobile application topics. Best of all, you will be provided with 100 percent of the source code with each line of code explained.
The approach taken in this book is to present a hands-on mission in each project. This approach will help you learn faster and more efficiently. You can enter the code listed in the book, or download it from the Packt Publishing website.
You'll be exposed to introductory mobile applications such as Hello Planet and Interface Fun. Each project is successively more complex. Additional projects include games, a calculator, and much, much more.
By the time you complete all the projects in this book, you'll have the confidence and skills necessary to develop your own mobile applications using LiveCode.
Project 1, Developing Hello Planet!, introduces LiveCode for mobile devices. In this project, you'll build your first mobile application.
Project 2, Developing User Interfaces, explains how to develop user interfaces including orientations and navigation.
Project 3, Using Math – Mobile Calculator, demonstrates how to create a mobile app calculator that supports addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This project also introduces the concept of random numbers.
Project 4, Building Menus – Menu of Menus, introduces LiveCode menus to include swipe, pulldown, option, combobox, pop up, tab, picker, and dropdown.
Project 5, Creating How Smart Am I? – A Quiz Game, explains how to create a mobile app quiz. Question types of true/false, multiple choice, sequencing, short answer, and picture-based are demonstrated.
Project 6, Creating the Find the Bananas Game, explains how to create a game based on the classic three-shell game. This project introduces how to use reference images and why it is so important.
Project 7, Creating the Jungle Dance Party Mobile App, introduces the concept of basic animation.
Project 8, Creating the My Database Mobile App, introduces you to creating and using databases in LiveCode.
Project 9, Advanced Fun with the Advanced Fun Mobile App, introduces you to several advanced features of LiveCode.
Project 10, In-app Purchases and Advertising for iOS and Android, explains how to implement in-app purchases and advertising for both iOS and Android mobile devices.
Appendix, Mobile App Development Primer, explains how to prepare your LiveCode mobile apps for submission to app stores.
In order to follow the examples provided in this book, you'll need a copy of LiveCode Community 6.1.1. or greater. This software is available for free at http://livecode.com/download/.
This book is written for people that are already familiar with the LiveCode development environment, but have not yet explored how to use their knowledge of LiveCode to create mobile apps.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
This section explains what you will build, with a screenshot of the completed project.
This section explains why the project is cool, unique, exciting, and interesting. It describes what advantage the project will give you.
This section explains the major tasks required to complete your project.
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4, and so on
This section explains any pre-requisites for the project, such as resources or libraries that need to be downloaded, and so on.
This section explains any preliminary work that you may need to do before beginning work on the task.
This section explains how the steps performed in the previous section allow us to complete the task.
The extra information in this section is relevant to the task.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We also added a call to that command at the end of the timeup
command."
A block of code is set as follows:
on openStack answer "Greetings!" titled "Hello Planet!" end openStack
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "So, navigate to File | Standalone Application Settings."
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