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

Making a simple calculator application


With even a basic familiarity with LiveCode, you can start to make something of use. Here we will make a very simple calculator stack.

Inspector clues, oh…

You will find yourself using the Inspector palette a lot, so take a moment to study how it behaves. When you select an object on the card you will see that the Inspector palette changes its appearance, sometimes even its height, to show the options for the item you have selected. It is smart enough to notice when you have selected multiple items, and will then show the align tools.

Sometimes you will want to keep an Inspector palette set to view the options of a particular object on the card, and to not switch to show a different object as you make other selections. In the upper right-hand side corner of the Inspector palette is a padlock icon, which will let you lock the inspector to the current object.

So far, most of the Inspector palette options haven't affected us, but one that is about to be relevant is the fact that you can set a name for an item that is different to its label. You may know from other programming languages, and this also applies to LiveCode, that some names are less legal than others. Perhaps you can't have spaces in the name, or use a colon, or backslash. If you name a button with a number, Button "1" may not be Button 1, and that could lead to confusion.

For the calculator keys we will set a label to make it look correct, and a name that doesn't lead to confusion. Speaking of those calculator keys…