09 October 2015
From the Forum — Issue #93
Welcome to the latest installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.
Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!
1. Deeplinking with intent
Getting our apps to play nice with everything else on your device is always a fun magic act. Finding the right hooks to pull up Tumblr or Instagram can be a bit of a guessing game, as OSes handle these custom URL schemes differently, between devices and between versions.
iOS 9, however, has come along to break what was working just fine in the past. Throwing errors when using some hooks (as reported by one intrepid Corona developer) had them re-thinking the entire endeavor. However, they did some testing, and are now sharing the fruits of their labor to make our lives just a bit easier. Now, Corona developers can jump into build.settings and edit their info.plist settings to include some quick lines to ensure that your deeplinks will operate as they were meant to!
Head on down to the original thread to learn more about this technique, and don’t forget to say thanks!
2. Graphing data using the best of the web
I always like the way that graphing data looks when represented in a straightforward and visually-pleasing way. It’s much easier to understand trends and stuff like that. Anyway, getting data to turn into graphs in code can take a fair bit of finagling. Tools exist outside of Corona that can handle the work, but knowing which ones work well within your app might take some testing.
Enter D3.js. A Corona developer has been trying to get string data to pass, via webview, to a local html file and push that to d3 for the heavy graph-creation lifting. The main functionality that is looking to be achieve here is “loading webview HTML pages with content that is dynamically generated”.
Check out the original thread below to learn how you can start incorporating dynamically generated graphs in your apps.
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/59546-creating-graphs-with-d3
3. Important note regarding Windows directories
With the new public release comes a lot additional scrutiny on the wild new frontier of Win32 platform deployment. Desktop games, once considered totally off-limits for Corona development, are now open for business.
A lot of the functionality from our normal Corona-developed apps will migrate just fine to desktop. As a general rule, if it works in the simulator, then it’s safe to say it’ll work as a build. But, as I noted a couple weeks ago with installer types, there are some things that you need to keep your eye on. As the title would imply, directory paths are one of those funny things that, surprise surprise, change around, depending on the OS.
Check out the below thread where a Corona engineer weighs in with a quick reference for Windows directories. A short read now might save you a serious headache later!
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/59382-system-directories-on-windows-builds
About Alex
Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Interactive, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancinteractive. Check out his new game Segreta on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Amazon devices.
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