corona lua storyboard...

When I was developing googly face the main problem I had was keeping variables clean and listeners nulled after use. My developers head was working like it would in as3. That didn't cut it... In the end, admittedly googly face scene management was cobbled together with a barrage of "nilling" vars and listeners here there and every where.... meh it worked, but would of been a frecking nightmare if it was in anyway more complicated.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.googleeyes&hl=en

This was the main issue I had to address when I thinking about my new app.
I had heard about coronas new storyboard API and this evening I have been doing some research into how it all works... Looks great!
http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/11/introducing-the-storyboard-api/

Its also made me that little bit more comfortable with my jukebox development ... Turns out the framework I came up with in my head for the juke is very similar to the storyboard api... maybe a little simpler but the same idea.

So anyway I can relate to this storyboard api quite easily.. But I need to get a better understanding of tables... I think its allot like objects in flash. This is what corona recommends for passing groups of data from one scene to the next.

Im also thinking about implementing a model as well, like in a MVC architecture. I think this would be one lua file full of global vars...? maybe? I dont like globals though... I was always advised to stay away from them in flash and always have done!


We will see...

I have some graphics that I've been working on this week. Time for some coding! ... It looks like a wet weekend so should get some done.

Im also going to do a quick blog post about screen set up for bother android/Idevice

Introducing googly face

So This week I released my first proper app. Googly face.
Its an app that's aimed at parents that need to entertain there children for a while. It certainly seems to work. Most children I have shown it to seem to love it. In fact my girl friends brothers kids would not go to sleep until they made one last "googly face".

I was really excited to get it out on the market... maybe a little to excited. some of the graphics on release were a little ropey. Something I'm looking to rectify over the coming months. I don't like the hair types.. I could really to do with a proper illustrator to do some "hair" illustrations for me.

Googly face has taken me best part of 4-5 months to develop. I worked on it on evenings and weekends. But with distractions... Thats the problem when working at home at a table in a room that looks directly into the living room, theirs always something on the telly or a video game to distract you. So its actually kind of hard to say exactly how many hours I have put into it. I think its allot though.

Allot has been over coming issues with a new language. Googly face is built using the corona sdk. Corona uses a language called lua. In some respects its been easy as, as a flash developer I can easily relate to lua... But lua is not ummmm a particularly strict language.. is strict the right word? maybe.
Basically I'm used to working with instances of code blocks... classes. My brain is very much wired to work like that. Something I found hard  to adjust to in lua.
But I can talk about that in another post some other time!


I've not really said what it does have I!
In brief googly face allows you to...

• select a photo from camera of gallery on a mobile device
• position and resize that image
• add various cartoon like parts to that image. That might be a pig nose, googly eyes, a tash ect.
• when a user presses the the play button these parts come to life. They animate, they play sound, they do stuff when pressed ect.

But take a look for your selves at the below link...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.googleeyes