Mobile App Development with Corona book

Today, Blue Bilby has an interview with Dr Brian Burton of Burton’s Media Group, author of the books Mobile App Development with Corona and Beginning Mobile App Development with Corona.

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into programming.
A: A little about myself? Let’s see, I just celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary with my beautiful wife Rosemary. I have 2 children: Brandon & Brianna (both in college). I have been teaching computer programming and information technology for.. wow, 20+ years now!
I got my start in the early 80’s programming a TRS-80. Even though I was told it was a ‘fad’, I stuck with programming and working on computers.. to the point that I used the money saved up to buy a first car to buy a computer instead. Fortunately the money I made programming computers allowed me to get a car later.

Q: Which languages have you developed in? Have you always developed for mobile devices or do you cover other platforms?
A: Being an ‘old-timer’ in Computer Science, I’ve programmed in more than a few languages: BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, CoBOL, C, Java, Objective-C, Haskell, and their visual equivalents plus a number of scripting languages: Lua, Actionscript, php, javascript, python, etc. I am firm believer that you need the right tool for the job. If you are going to make your living coding (or teaching coding) you need to make sure you have enough tools to get the job done.
Programming for mobile devices was an outgrowth of my research into Virtual Worlds; I could see that the next logical step for Virtual Worlds was to be available through mobile phones and tablets, so I made the leap to mobile app development soon after iOS became available.

Q: What brought you to Ansca’s Corona SDK for mobile development? Was the cross-platform support important to you?
A: Cross-platform support is what brought me to ANSCA’s Corona SDK. After teaching and developing for iOS devices, I knew there had to be a better way. It was obvious that Android was going to be a serious contender in the mobile marketplace and I didn’t really want to have to re-code every project to be able to support both operating systems. I knew there had to be a better way. So in late 2009/early 2010 I began researching cross-platform tools. There were more than a few available, but Corona was a stand-out and still is with its ability to create great apps AND games. I spent the summer of 2010 learning Corona and creating a few blog tutorials on how to use the SDK. That Fall I showed my mobile app development class Corona. They demanded more. We were completing projects that took six weeks in Objective-C in 2 class periods. The final piece was creating an early proto-type of the Space Explorer game (chapters 9 & 10 of my book) over the course of 5 class periods. Who creates a mobile game prototype from scratch in 5 hours? Corona developers do!

Q: There are now so many SDKs for mobile development now, including free and commercial versions. Why do you like to use Corona in preference to another SDK?
A: Last spring I again surveyed the cross-platform mobile app tools that were available. There are a lot more options available now than a couple of years ago. Now I might be somewhat biased, but ANSCA Mobile’s Corona SDK is still the leader of the pack. Sure there are SDK’s and tools that might have a particular feature that Corona doesn’t .. yet. But overall the competitors just don’t have the breadth and depth of Corona SDK. Plus ANSCA has one of the best developer communities that I have ever experienced. It speaks to the popularity of Corona that it was rated in the top 5 game engines that developers are planning to use by GD magazine.

Q: Why did you decide to write a book on Corona development?
A: The book was purely an outgrowth of interest and demand from my students. I needed a textbook that I could send my students to as a reference and would also help them to get through the sticky points of mobile app development. I had been in the process of deciding the topic of my next book for several months, so it seemed a natural fit. Kismet if you will.

Q: How long did it take to write the book?
A: Much longer than I anticipated! I was making great progress… almost a chapter and a ½ a week! The book was 2/3 finished when I got stung by a wasp, had an allergic reaction and almost died! The sting was on my left forearm and I wasn’t able to use the arm for over 6 weeks. By then, classes had resumed and so my writing was dramatically slowed. All told, it took 8 months from the time I started writing until the book was completed.

Q: What do you think are the most important elements to keep in mind for mobile development?
A: It is all about the user experience. Provide the people using your game/app a valuable experience and they will look for your other apps and games. Give them a poor experience and the odds of them giving you another chance is not very good.

Q: What qualifications, if any, do you have in programming?
A: Well, over 30 years of programming experience, a degree in Computer Information Systems, a minor in Computer Science and 20+ years of experience teaching programming to people from ages 12 through 72.

Q: What does your book cover?
A: The book was developed as a first semester course in mobile application development for students who had some programming experience (i.e. know how to do an if then statement, do while loop, and create a function). The first couple of chapters go at a moderate pace, introducing the development environment, how to handle orientation change, graphics, buttons, etc.
In later chapters I cover working with SQLite databases, file i/o, and network communications. I’ve tried to create a guided framework that people can quickly learn mobile app development.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add?
A: I have three exciting projects that I am currently working on:
First, I am in the midst of writing a new book that is for the absolute beginner in programming and app development. I was recently asked if Corona could be used to teach programming instead of learning other languages first. I feel that it is a great way to get started with learning to program. The great thing about this new book is that you have developed your own apps by the end of the book!
Second, I am developing online courses for those who would like more interaction to learn to make mobile apps. I am calling this effort B.I.T. for Burton Institute of Technology. It is my goal to continue to expand the course offerings over time, but I will start with mobile app and game development.
Finally, I am finishing a book that covers the entire game development pipeline. I didn’t like having to leave out HOW the graphics and sound were developed for my previous books due to space and time limitations. This new book is devoted to developing one game from concept to publication.
All of these projects should be finished during the summer of 2012 (assuming I don’t get stung by another wasp).

Fairy Defense

Click here to read all about it!

Today we are interviewing Bogdan Vladu, creator of the SpriteHelper and LevelHelper applications.

Tell us a bit of your history about how you got into the development business to start.

My first real job was to port a game developed in DirectX to OpenGL in order to make it run on Mac OS.
This was a fun and interesting experience that somehow gave me the thirst for game development. But somehow, life took me in another direction. Most of my experience is as software engineer for air traffic and train traffic control software. This teach me all about software development processes.

What platforms have you developed for?
I think, I covered all platforms. Maybe even some that were proprietary.

Which languages have you developed in? What is your favourite?
If I think about it, I touched all major languages but most of my coding was done in C, C++ and now Objective C. My favorite, I have to say its Objective C. Yes, i know people hate it at first, but once you get into it, most of the stuff that people hate in the beginning start to make sense and then you cant do with out. Where in C and C++ you can have good code if you follow a few principles in Objective C some of this principles are imposed. Hence, programmers write better code.

Tell us a bit about your SpriteHelper and LevelHelper applications. What are they and what do they do?

SpriteHelper is 3 tools in one. Its a sprite editor, pack the sprites in order to make the final image file as small as possible, finds all the individual sprites if you provide an already packed image file and lets you set properties like opacity, scale, color tint and more for each sprite that later you can use in your game engine.
Its a physic editor, auto traces shapes for the sprites, let you manually create shapes and most importantly, in version 1.8 (people can already download the beta from www.spritehelper.org) you can set properties and do advance collision, like the ability to figure out in what part of the body the collision took place.
And finally, its an animation editor, it lets you visualize and create animations that you can use in your game engine. With version 1.8 you can set up notifications with user data that you can receive when playing that animation in your game engine.

LevelHelper is a level editor. It gives you the ability to layout sprites by drag and drop, create parallaxes, path movement, joints and more. Version 1.4.9 (download the beta from www.levelhelper.org) has introduces some advance features, like assets, which makes it easy for you to duplicate and instantiate by code advance objects that are created with or without joints. Custom user data property which lets you set data on your sprites like strings, booleans, numbers, arrays (tables of data) and coming in 1.5 many more.

Why did you decide to develop these apps for Corona in particular?
The tools initially did not support Corona, but because I was asked by Corona users, I added support for it. Corona SDK its a very nice engine. I consider that it still has to grow in some parts but what you can do with it as it is right now shows great potential. It all depends on what Ansca will do with it.

What challenges have you faced creating these applications?
The most changes comes from the restrictions imposed by a game engine. When I add a new feature I must make sure that I would be able to support all engines, or at least part of it. Like for example, in Corona SDK the ability to cut sprites in real time its not available. But who knows, maybe in the future this will be possible.

Have you seen a strong demand for SpriteHelper and LevelHelper?
Yes, people are starting to learn the tools and use them. I have seen some amazing games created with them. My iPad is full of games created by my users. I have seen features of LevelHelper used in ways I did not even imagine when I have created them.

Do you have anything you can tell us about future updates to your applications?
I cannot really talk about future update until the moment the update will be available, but I can say that the plan I have right now for both apps will take me about 2 years to finish. There will be some amazing updates coming.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Always try to innovate and believe that everything is possible.

Bogdan Vladu

Thanks to Bogdan for agreeing to be interviewed by Blue Bilby. Now everyone go out and buy his applications: SpriteHelper and LevelHelper!

SpriteHelper

Top Features:
- Pack all your sprites into one image file.
- Automatically find texture coordinates of your sprites.
- Create complex shapes for Box2d and Chipmunk.
- Create holes in your shapes.
- Edit texture properties.
- Edit physic properties.
- Support for Cocos2d (Obj C), Cocos2d-X (C++), Corona SDK, AndEngine and WiEngine.
- Create animations from your sprites.
- Get help from the expanding community on the dedicated forum.

Description:
SpriteHelper is a comprehensive and efficient tool which brings you a texture and a physic shape editor in one single package.

Pack all your sprites

SpriteHelper uses an advance algorithm to find and select the layout of all your sprites and to pack them into one single image in order for you to save memory.

One file for all engines

With the provided code you can load all your sprites with/without physic with one single line of code into your favorite game engine.

Edit physic parameters

You can edit parameters like friction, density, restitution or even define a masks for your objects. If you don’t define a shape on a sprite it will automatically create a quad based object or a circle. You can even set your object to have a fixed rotation to be static, dynamic or kinematic.

Edit sprite properties

You can change the color*, scale, opacity and even set a Z Order* for your sprite right from inside SpriteHelper. No need to write line after line of code to make a sprite just like you want inside your engine.

Make sure you watch the movie presentation and download the Corona tutorial project to see how easy it is to use from the website, under Tutorials section

LevelHelper

Top features:

• Create complex levels with physic in just minutes.
• Don’t have to write code to load the level.
• Generates code for Cocos2d (C++ and Objective C) with/without physics in Box2d
• Generates code for CORONA (lua) with/without physics in Box2d
• Transform your sprites to suit your levels with size, opacity, angle and many more.
• Change the physic properties on one or multiple sprites at once.
• Create joints and make complex physic simulations.
• Create masks so that you control if one object collide with another.
• Duplicate objects easy and with specified offset.
• Create tags and control objects in your custom code.
• Add your own custom classes to the objects.
• Snap to grid to align your sprites better.
• Unlimited undo/redo

Features list:

Professional Code Editor
Autocomplete, word wrap, syntax highlight, page guide, background and text color, matching braces, auto indent and more.

Smart Auto Complete
Predicts and completes the functions and variables as they are typed.

Smart Arguments
Auto complete functions with mandatory and optional arguments.

Help Navigator
Description about the common Lua and Corona SDK functions.

Visual Debugger
Place breakpoints and see your app execution flow.

Variable Printing
View variables content in memory while debugging by just clicking on it in the code file.

Console Output
View and search through the logs inside the app. Clear logs when no longer useful.

Error Visualizer
With the build-in error editor, navigate to the file and line that has a problem with just a click.

Project Manager
Create, delete, rename files and folders from the navigator.

Templates
Create new projects with the help of templates.

Assets Visualizer
Preview all assets from the project navigator. Build in support for zoom in and out.

Syntax Creator
Add, edit, remove auto complete functions.

Video tutorials from basic to advance usage. Video’s will be updated soon to show the usage with the subscription version of Corona SDK.

While designing graphics for iOS games, I came across the need to continually resize my images. At first, I created images in two sizes: One for iPhone 4/4S/iPad and an image half this size for the iPhone 3GS. But now, we have the new iPad (2012) and it’s getting annoying to resize images after each time I design them and create suffixes so I have assets for each platform resolution.

I needed an easy resolution and so I created the iOSResizer for Mac OS X. It’s an Automator script. You simply drag your large images — which are created for the new iPad dimensions — on top of the iOSResizer icon and it’ll create a directory on your desktop called “iOSResizer Images“. Inside will be a copy of your original image (now renamed with @4x as a suffix), an iPhone 4/4S/iPad image (with the @2x suffix) and an iPhone 3GS image with no suffix.

This Automator workflow can be used by anybody, but it was created with Ansca Corona developers in mind.

Here’s some screenshots:

Below is the icon you drag your images onto:

This is the folder on the Desktop where your resized images will appear:

Here’s a list of example images to resize.

And, finally, a list of images inside the “iOSResizer Images” folder on the Desktop.

You can even drag the application to your Mac OS X dock at the bottom of the screen!

I hope you find this small utility useful. Please feel free to modify it, but don’t forget to give me credit for the original application!

And now for your pleasure, the application:

Click the image below to download IOSResizer for Mac OS X by Jason Oakley of Blue Bilby.

Note that when you use it, this app will delete any files which already exist with the same name in the iOSResizer Images folder.

Previously, it’d show whichever was the latest video in the account — even if it wasn’t a Tech Webcast episode.

Now, it will display only the latest Tech Webcast episode:

You will also note the all-important “More Videos »” link at the bottom of the screen. Click this to view the last four YouTube videos uploaded to the account.

There’s a link at the bottom of that page to go back to the latest Tech Webcast show!

The Tech Webcast app “TW Podcast“  is completed!

If you buy the app, you will find a NEWS section which will feature contests and giveaways only available to you!

The app is Universal for iOS in that you purchase it once and it will work on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with automatic scaling.

The app costs US$0.99c in the App Store. Well worth it for the new features.

Click the screenshot below to view detailed information about the new app and find a link to buy it!

v2.0 has now been uploaded to the app store with Landscape viewing.