corona scrollview masking issues now fixed!

Unfortunately I have not been able to get my app googly face on to the amazon market.
When I submitted the app I received an email to tell me that my app submission had been unsuccessful due an issue where the screen would go black if the app lost focus. For example if you took a phone call and then came back to the app it would now be black.

This proofed difficult to home down as it was only occurring on device, I could not reproduce the problem within the corona simulator.  

Finally after hours of commenting bits of code out I homed it down to an issue with masking on the scrollers for picking googly parts.

Then after many hours of trying to fix it I realised the issue wasn't my code.. It was in fact an issue with corona.

I submitted this as a bug about two weeks ago... Its now finally been fixed today! Hats off to corona though. They do listen to there community and I had allot of support from staff members on the forums.

If you are not a subscriber you will not be able to install the version that supports it. Corona release fixes for subscribers. None subscribers can only get there hands on the stable version.

So next stop resubmission to the amazon market!

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

Googly face scroll bar masking issue

Spent this evening trying to sort a bug out that occurs if your in edit mode of googly face. At this point if the app loses focus, for example you answer a phone call and you then go back to googly face you will find all the graphics are screwed up. At first, after a corona staff member looked at it we came to the conclusion that this was an issue with load from media method. I even checked this in as a bug .. but after a little more playing I have come to realise it has nothing to do with get media method. It is Infact something to do with a mask assigned to a group that contains the scroller for the menus. I'm still not completely convinced this isn't a bug, if it isn't then its an issue with the scroll http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/scroll-content

It might be that this code is now obsolete and as been replaced. Hopefully get chance to reseach this over the weekend and implement it.

I need to get it fixed as it's stopping me from getting googly face on the amazon market.

Googly face.. its for the kids.

So googly face has not by any means had the number of installs I had hoped... 9 so far!
..I really need to work on that... Its not a bad app really?? especially when its free!
But what was quit humbling and put a smile on my face (googly face) was when Nicola (my ball un chain) told me her niece who is 3years old asked out of the blue, to play on googly face... Nice that! And its nice to see the kids I have watched using it roll over laughing and argue about whos turns next..

So the download numbers or disappointing.. But for the ones I have seen with the app, makes me that little bit more proud of googly face.

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

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