Book Image

LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide

By : Colin Holgate
Book Image

LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide

By: Colin Holgate

Overview of this book

LiveCode is a tool for developing mobile apps designed for those who don't want to use Objective-C, C++ or Java. Although it is a tool full of rich features to create apps it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build interactive and fun apps. Using this book, you can develop various apps and this book guides you through "till you upload the apps in the appstore."LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide" will explain how to create applications with the easiest, most practical cross platform framework available, Livecode Mobile and upload the apps to the appstore with minimal effort.Throughout the book, you'll learn details that will help you become a pro at mobile app development using LiveCode. You begin with simple calculator application and quickly enhance it using LiveCode Mobile. Start by learning the interface controls for videos and images of LiveCode's environment. Dig into configuring devices, building user interfaces, and making rich media applications, then finish by uploading the mobile applications to App Stores. You will learn how to build apps for devices such as iPhone, Android with the recently developed LiveCode Mobile through sample applications of increasing complexity.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Debugging


If you did go ahead and try the calculator before we had entered all the scripts it needed, you most likely would have got to see the script debugging in action. Hopefully you managed to cope with what you saw; it can be overwhelming at first. The following screenshot is what it would have looked like:

Most of what you see is the same as when you edit scripts, but if you do see the debug variation you are actually in a paused state, a freeze frame of the program as it runs. In this example the program stopped because line 46 is looking for a field named dis play, and there isn't such a field, it should be display.

The error message at the bottom makes it clear that the error is something to do with the field name, and you would quickly spot the typo. Sometimes though you may need to inspect the variables, to make sure they contain the values you think they should. The Variables tab will show a list of those.

An unexpected problem is the one time you may see the debugger, but when developing a script you are able to set Breakpoints by clicking in the column just to the left-hand side of the line number you want to halt the program at.

Once the script is halted by a breakpoint, you can use the row of buttons at the top to step through the code. Those buttons are:

  • Continue will set the script running again

  • Stop will stop the script running, so that you can make changes

  • Show next statement will show an indicator to the left-hand side of the current line

  • Step into next statement is used for stepping into a different handler

  • Step over next statement will go onto the next statement in the current handler, without stepping into a handler mentioned on the current line

  • Step out of current handler is used to skip the remaining lines in a handler that you had previously stepped into, and exit back out to the handler that called the current one

You will become more familiar with the script editor and debugger as you go along, but that should get you started!