Local stored website

Den_er_da_hvid

Hi

A few month ago I tried out Corona sdk. I got sidetracked with other stuff but now I am ready to take up my project again. I am thinking of switching to Gideros instead and I have some questions whether I can use what I already made or need to rethink some things...

1. My original plan was to make some locally stored html files and use a webview to show them inside my app. Is this possible in Gideros?
Example code:
local webView = native.newWebView( display.contentCenterX, display.contentCenterY, 320, 480 )
webView:request( "xyz.html" )

2. I also need to get the time (just day and month) from the phone. In Corona I found something like:
local date = os.date( '*t' )
Could this also work in Gideros?


*Note I am not a programmer. I know some html and CSS and just starting out with LUA.

greengeek

os.date should work. See this http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/lua/os/date#os.date

I don't know about using webview for local HTML files. This thread might help you. http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/1300/how-to-display-html-in-my-app-
uikit-plugin-feature-48/p1
I also recommend searching forum posts.

I have evaluated various cross platform game engines before settling on Gideros. So far, it's been great. I like the open source part of Gideros compared to Corona and also the dev community is great in responding to all beginner and advanced queries. You should definitely give it a try. Cheers.

simwhi

@Den_er_da_hvid We have used other platforms previously. In our opinion, Gideros is the best.

I'm not sure about webview/HTML, but as @greengeek wrote in his post, do a quick search. There are plug-ins for Android/iOS, but I have never used them. This feature could be beneficial to our projects in the future too.

Den_er_da_hvid

Thanks @greengeek and @simwhi for giving me confidence in giving Gideros a chance. Gideros seems more "whole" than Corona did. You don't need to write the code in a different software, and you can easily get overview of where pictures etc. are stored... Small things but important for noobs :-)

It seems that UIkid was only for IOS and has been discontinued. My initial search did not show other plugins, but I did find somewhere something about programming UI directly in lua as alternative to html Like scrallbar etc. I will look into that.

Perhaps it is for the better. It forces me to work more with lua code,
My idear is to make different stages instead of the html files. there is propably a better way, a "correct" way to use tables or arrays or something, but I havent quite wrapped my mind around those yet.

keszegh

if you needed webview only for the gui then it would be much easier to make the ui in lua. there are button, slider etc. classes already out there (look in the forum etc) and complete ui setups too:
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/6202/beginnings-of-a-lua-based-gui-/p1
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/6290/graphic-user-interfaces/p1
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/4208/widget-candy-for-gideros/p1
(the first is 'beta', the third is not free, the second is a general purpose gui creator)
also if you need only android e.g. then you can use nativeui plugin to use native ui elements.

all in all i did not use any of these as making your own gui is not that hard (modifying buttons, sliders etc).

Den_er_da_hvid

Thanks for input @keszegh.

I think I need to do some tutorials first on what classes are and what stages are. I have an idea but I am not sure I understand them correctly in this context.

Basically I need to show a picture and corresponding text underneath (maybe up to 200 words)
There is about 150 different pictures.

keszegh

indeed, you should start with some tutorials to learn the basics of programming, objected oriented programming (oop), lua and gideros.
check out http://giderosmobile.com/guide ,especially the first few videos, here stage, sprites, etc. will be explained.
classes are basically collections of objects/functions to do something specific. e.g. http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/ here almost all item is a class: sprite, bitmap, etc. but one can make new classes e.g. a button class that you can use for every button in your gui, or anything else. this way classes help to reuse elements from other projects of yours or of other people. the oop tutorial video should explain this.

if you are a complete beginner in programming too, then reading a book should be very helpful. see again the books at http://giderosmobile.com/guide

btw what you aim to do seems simple enough, you should be able to do that relatively early, no need to be a complete expert in gideros.

keszegh

btw there are other frameworks that can convert a homepage to a mobile app more or less, so that knowing html is almost enough to build a simple app. but you would still need to use javascript at some point, so learning programming is unavoidable after a while. thus all in all i think learning lua and using gideros will give you much more freedom in what you can do in the long term.