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 

Corona scroll menu/text/images

This evening, if I'm given a chance I will be looking at implementing scrollable menus into my new app. One to the left of the screen, one to the right and one at the bottom. I think the best place to start for this is by running through the below tutorial.
http://developer.anscamobile.com/content/scroll-view

All in all I need three menus on the screen at anyone time. Thats going to take up a fair old lump of screen real estate. Hoping I can still design it in such away that its still usable!

That said Im technical support for my mum this evening, her internet has been off over the weekend so I need to go fix that. ... Then its a Tesco shop trip!

Corona Local Vars

So last night I had 20 mins to spare after dinner at me mams house.
Just realised that if you dont mark a variable as "local" then you can access this if its sat in seperate module

sooo having the below in the main.lua....


local testlib = require("testlib")
print("testlib.hello")

....Will print what ever hello is equal to.

Local I suppose is the equivalent of a private variable in flash class.

Corona, Lua

Started writing a phone app using Corona. Corona is the compiler, the language is lua and you can get a plugin for it for eclispe. Plug-ins ok. Doesn't pick up on everything.
Its good though, bit similar to actionscript, in fact the creators of it I think are X adobe employees.
Still has its issues though. I would like to see classes, and I would like somthing similar to events. unique events like what you can create in action script. I think you can do stuff like modules... which are a bit like classes. Will research that a bit further.
Im going to stick at it though. I need to start learning new languages.