Everyone you know has a smart mobile device of some kind. You probably own several too! The general idea of having utility applications on a phone is not new. Even cell phone and PDA games have existed for years, but the way that iPhone used touch instead of a stylus or keyboard and the way it used gestures to reduce the number of steps to do something was a game changer.
iPhone was released in June 2007 and the Android OS was released in September 2008. If you wanted to create something that worked on both platforms, you'd had to learn two development environments and languages: Objective-C for iPhone and Java for Android.
In the desktop world, there are several development tools that allow you to publish apps on both Mac and Windows as well as Linux in the case of LiveCode. The most successful of these tools are Adobe Director, Adobe Flash, Unity, and LiveCode. Publishing apps to iOS was introduced with Adobe Director 12, which means that all four tools are also suitable for mobile development.
These tools have different strengths; in some cases, the strengths relate to the nature of the applications you can make and in other cases, they relate to how accessible the tool is to people who are not hardcode programmers. If you want to make a high-quality 3D game, Unity would be the best choice, with Director and then Flash as other choices. If you need a lot of character animations, Flash would be the best choice, Adobe Director being a good alternate.
If the most important thing for you is how approachable the tool is, then LiveCode wins easily. It's also a valid choice to make the majority of apps you might wish to make. In fact, for apps that are a set of single screens, as would be the case for most utility apps as well as board and puzzle games, LiveCode is better suited than other tools. It also has better access to native interface elements; with the other tools, you usually have to create graphics that resemble the look of native iOS and Android controls instead of accessing the real thing.
With its easy-to-use near-English programming language and the stack of cards metaphor, LiveCode lets you concentrate more on creating the app you want to make and less on the technicalities of the development environment.
Chapter 1, LiveCode Fundamentals, introduces you to the LiveCode environment and to its near-English programming language. Experienced LiveCode users can skip this chapter, but for someone new to LiveCode, this chapter will take you through the process of creating a simple calculator app as a way to make you familiar with the various tools and hierarchy of LiveCode.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with LiveCode Mobile, describes in detail how to set up your Mac or Windows computer so that you are ready to develop and publish mobile apps. This chapter will take you all the way through from signing up as an iOS and Android developer to creating and testing your first LiveCode mobile app.
Chapter 3, Building User Interfaces, shows how to use some of the standard mobile features, such as date pickers, photo albums, and a camera. This chapter will also show you how to make your own buttons that have an iOS-like look to them and how to use the LiveCode add-on, MobGUI, to make your life easier!
Chapter 4, Using Remote Data and Media, discusses the structure of your apps, where to place your code, and how to read and write to external text files. Here, we will also create a mobile app that is a "web scraper" capable of extracting links and media from a web page to show or play media from that page.
Chapter 5, Making a Jigsaw Puzzle Application, will show you how to process image data and how to use the information to create a color picker, detect regions, and to make a collision map. We will then create a full jigsaw puzzle application that takes its image from the photo album or device camera.
Chapter 6, Making a Reminder Application, examines which information is needed to represent a "reminder" and how to set up notification events so that you are alerted at a specified date and time. Here, we will make a reminder app that can create a list of such events and even list those events based on your current location.
Chapter 7, Deploying to Your Device, is a reference chapter that describes all of the mobile publishing settings. This chapter also shows you how to send apps to beta testers and how to get started with the submission of your finished app to various app stores.
Appendix, Extending LiveCode, describes add-ons to LiveCode that will make your mobile apps look better or will extend the mobile capabilities of LiveCode. The planned LiveCode builder and widget capabilities of LiveCode's Version 8 are introduced as well.
In addition to Community LiveCode 7.0 or its later versions, you will need a Mac or PC, iOS and/or Android devices, and some money if you follow the parts about signing up as a mobile developer in this book! For iOS development, you will need access to a Mac OS for some of the steps and these steps also require it to be an Intel-based Mac.
The ideal reader for this book would be someone who already knows LiveCode, is interested in creating mobile apps, and wants to save the many hours it took for me to track down all of the information on how to get started! Chapter 1, LiveCode Fundamentals, will help those of you who know programming but are not familiar with LiveCode. The knowledge you've acquired should be enough for you to benefit from the remainder of the book.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Time for action, What just happened?, Pop quiz, and Have a go hero).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a procedure or task, we use these sections as follows:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
The instructions here often need some extra explanation to ensure that they make sense, so they are followed with the following sections.
This section explains the working of the tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book. Take the following section for example.
These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
You will also find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The contents of the display field are stored in the currentValue variable and the last operator button you pressed (that is stored in currentCommand) is looked at, to see what happens next."
A block of code is set as follows:
on togglesign
if character 1 of field "display" is "-" then
delete character 1 of field "display"
else
put "-" before field "display"
end if
end togglesignAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
start using stack "utility stack"
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: "In the Tools palette, click on the Edit tool (the top-right icon)."
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