Corona Geek Hangout – Episode 7 – App Discovery, iOS6 Adoption, and Gotta Feed Garp!

01 October 2012

Corona Geek Hangout – Episode 7 – App Discovery, iOS6 Adoption, and Gotta Feed Garp!


Corona Geek, Google+ Hangouts

Corona Geek On Air episode 7 is live!

This week we discuss the release notes from previous Corona SDK builds, talk about app discovery and Apple App Store changes, iOS6 adoption rates, app review Gotta Feed Garp, and discuss pulling data remotely using the Corona SDK’s JSON features.

Be sure to see the show notes below for a full list of resources that were referenced during the show.

As always, be sure to join us next Monday at 2pm CST for Episode 4 and add us to your Google+ Corona SDK circle.

Thanks for watching,

Charles McKeever
Corona Geek

Show Geeks:

If you are new to the conversation, the Corona SDK is a cross platform mobile development tool kit that makes it easy for developers to create native applications for Android and iOS devices as well as for Kindle, and Nook. Find out more about Corona SDK.

In this episode of the Corona Geek On Air Show we covered:

—

Lastest Build Release Notes

  • Build 925: Nook HD/HD+ support was added for Android.
  • Build 923: Print messages now go to NSLog instead of the terminal. This is an XCode issue and was applied to core.

Newbie Questions

  • Question: How to do a Print screen from simulator
  • Answer: Peach Pellen – The Xcode simulator also has a grab screen option, CMD+S will save a screenshot while using it.
  • Question: Where are the CMD+S screenshots saved?
  • Answer: Peach Pellen – This depends on your version of Xcode, one version did have an issue, I believe that was 4.2- but if you have a working version; ~/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Screenshots

Corona Blog Highlights

 

  • A combined total of 44.58% of iPads and iPhones have been upgraded to ios6

 

App Review – Gotta Feed Garp, Developed by Paper Robot Studios.

Look for a full Corona Geek app review, coming soon.

  • Cost: Free
  • Type: Physics based game
  • Goal: Feed Garp and collect stars along the way
  • Scoring: base on time, stars, and number of shots taken
  • Difficulty: increases as you play.
  • Art work: consistent and very well directed
  • Style: map color pencils and children’s room theme. Lots of visual texture.
  • Different food has different physics properties
    • Oranges are stiff heavy
    • Strawberries are bouncy and lighter
  • In-App purchases are available
    • food packs
    • shot marker
    • shot tracer
    • unlock levels
    • remove ads
    • combo packs
  • Cons: Level one repeats the intro story every time you play that level, but you can tap to skip the three of four screens.

Industry News

  • How will Apple’s App Store search changes affect user experience and developer sales?

 

  • Apple changes in app promotion rules

 

API Spotlight – Accessing Remote Data Using Corona SDK JSON:

Rob Miracle’s JSON example app

 

  • Requirements: Corona SDK, PHP, MySQL
  • App side: 20 lines of code
  • Web side: 60 lines of code
  • Mobile app communicates with remote web app
    • passes encoded url parameters
    • displays a message based on response code
  • Remote web application communicates with database
    • decode parameters
    • MD5 hash password compare
    • performs a sql lookup
    • return status based on findings
  • Hickups we discovered while working through the example:
    • email database field not defined in db
    • order of app code isn’t correct in the example
    • the call back function needs to be defined before network.request is made
    • data encode/decode, md5 hash was confusing at first
    • but, other than that, this is a very good example of using JSON to talk to a web server.
  • Practical application – pull new maps or info into a maps app 🙂

Download the complete Corona SDK JSON app code from github

Let’s Connect

Charles McKeever
[email protected]

Charles McKeever is a life long computer geek who enjoys exploring technologies to understand how they work, how they can be smashed together, and how they can be used to fuel entrepreneurial endeavors.

1Comment

Post A Comment