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

Chapter 5, Making a Jigsaw Puzzle Application


Pop-Quiz – how many bits in a byte?

Answer: 8. If only for the interest of mathematicians, it's good to know that a byte is 8 bits. A "bit" is a "binary digit", and when you start to think of bits in those terms you will see that a byte can store 2 to the power of 8 values in it ("binary" being Base 2). That came into play when looking at the length of a Pascal string (2 to the power of 8 is 256, hence the range of characters in a Pascal String is 0-255), and it helps you realize that if a picture is made up of one byte for each pixel's red, green, and blue values, it's a 24-bit picture. Once you add in another byte of data for the alpha channel, you have a 32 bit picture.

Pop-Quiz – getting the big picture

Answer: Depends on the nature of the image. SVG is a description of how to draw the image, whereas PNG is a description of the pixels in the image. In PNG that information is also data compressed, in a lossless way. For the example map, at its original size, a 24-bit PNG is half the size of the SVG file. There is a lot of data needed to describe the outlines of the US states! If the image needs to be enlarged, the PNG file would become bigger, while the SVG would remain the same file size. On the other hand, if an image was a rectangle of a diagonal gradient the SVG would be tiny, and the PNG would be huge, because there are no long runs of same colored pixels for the data compression to work well.

Pop-Quiz – calculate this!

Answer: 16,777,216 buttons. As with the discussion about "bits and bytes", red, green, and blue values combine to give us 2 to the power of 24 possible values. If you only used two of the colors, then the answer would have been 65,536.