LUA / Gideros Newbie

peteshaw

Hi, I'm Pete from London and this is part introduction, part question.

Firstly my background in programming was BASIC back in the early eighties when kids (as I was) typed in listings from smudged thermal printouts that invariably wouldn't work because you made a typing error or where command was hidden under the shift-function gymnastics of a dead-flesh ZX Spectrum keyboard. I was the kid writing those crappy games.

My programming was then put on ice while real developers were writing things in machine code (alien to me) until the beginning of the century when the web came along and scripting was something I could handle again.

When Apple launched the iPhone SDK, I had a stab at Objective-C, but quickly realised this was a learning curve I didn't have the mountaineering gear to climb. I even went on a formal training class, and even though I was the star pupil on the course, I still hadn't gotten my head around Objective-C so I gave up and went back to playing with PHP and Javascript.

But I recently stumbled across LUA. First through Corona, and then after reading some posts warning me off Corona, Gideros. LUA may not be PHP, Javascript or BASIC, but it certainly looks like a language I can get the hang off without spending hours looking at sample code blocks wondering what the hell does that line do.

For my first project I want to take the contents of a website I created and turn it into a native app. Basically it's an events listing site, so I'm going to need to get things into a scrolling list, probably access maps and drop pins, possibly even play video content. In my head I'm thinking I need to have some way of the app locally storing listings data, but get it to background download the latest data if it gets a sniff of a data connection.

So, is this sort of thing possible in LUA, or is it all about games? Are the any code examples of the sort of things I'm describing? Am I mad for even thinking about this.

Your guru comments are appreciated.

ar2rsawseen

Hello @peteshaw

I would want to say that Lua seems definitely what you are looking for (its also quite similar to Javascript), but Gideros might not be.

But there is no one better to answer it than @OZApps (our app Guru )

If you wanted to create a game, I'd say go for it, Gideros will be great.

But creating native app, well... It is possible, but it might not be easy. We have couple of apps published and working great both with Native UI or with OpenGL rendered ui.

But the problems are:
With Native UI, there are native bridges, to access native ui components etc, but then you might need to understand lots of things underneath for each specific plaform to use them

With Rendered UI (example: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recounter/id850985110?mt=8)
You can use completely crossplatform code and make them behave the same, etc. But you would need to recreate lots of UI elements yourself, or use third party solutions, as for example: http://www.x-pressive.com/WidgetCandy_Corona/media.html

My main concern is that stumbling on complications with app creation, you would dismiss Gideros as unusable and miss all the good stuff it does for game creation

OZApps

hi @peteshaw,
welcome, there are a couple of ex-ZX programmers here. Some hobbyists and some that have commercial releases to their name.

Without going into a lot of details, Lua is an easy to use and forgiving language it is in many ways easier than ZX Basic (even if you were using 128K mode)

If you read up on Lua on Wikipedia and lua.org or my Book you will find that Lua was made for easy access to enter and validate data. The GUI component added to Lua in the form of Frameworks made it easier to generate applications for the Mobile (iOS and Android).

Gideros has had slow exposure in comparison to other frameworks, mainly also due to the fact that the other Framework had early adopters that created libraries, created exposure and Bubble Ball.

Gideros is capable of what the other framework you mentioned can do but to nearly the Enterprise level capabilities and for FREE or a very affordable license (the advantages of getting a license are source code and asset protection amongst other things)

I will admit that Gideros is not the Silver Bullet, but if you look at the forums, you can find that there are several amazing demos and concepts of what you can do with Gideros, including huge lists, clipboard, inter-app communication, widgets (native and emulated) and the list goes on along with amazing samples and demos for Physics, Gaming and Graphics.

You need to spend sometime looking through, searching for what you want it has to be there and linked from the forums.

BTW, another fun fact there are plenty of developers that tried the other framework before settling on Gideros.

ianchia

Hello @peteshaw,

Welcome to the Gideros Community! (I've been out of it myself for a little while, but getting back into the swing of things porting a Gideros iPad enterprise app to iPhone.)

As an example of some of what you're talking about, you can look at a couple of my hybrid HTML/Gideros apps that do what you want. The only caveat is that you *will* have to get your hands dirty with some Objective-C and use the open source native UI plugin to render web views. My basic approach as a MVC type pattern and use the Gideros Lua layer as the Model and Controller and the web views as the Views where necessary. It's also handy to have OpenGL as a graphically heavy view when needed. (I am skeptical as to when a comprehensive native UI plugin from Gideros the company will ever be available given there's been no interest or love given to this for over 2 years… sorry if you're offended @ar2rsawseen but you do express your strong dislike of Objective-C pretty openly on these forums.)

Download these and have a play:
iPhone:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/open-studios/id388416851?mt=8

iPad:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/photosentinel-viewer/id680404511?mt=8

(I'm currently porting the iPad app to iPhone, which is not that hard, just basically redesigning the user experience so it works elegantly on an iPhone sized interface. All the Model and Controller code remains the same. One major reason why I like Gideros *a lot!*.)

I think that's basically along the lines of what you're possibly aiming for.

Any questions - just ask away on this thread…

Best,

- Ian

ianchia

Oh, one tip I would recommend is to develop a templating engine and use something like Zurb Foundation 5 http://foundation.zurb.com to render your viewports. That's an approach that's worked tremendously for me.