The easiest way to make mobile and desktop apps.
Our fourth NSB/AppStudio Programming Contest is underway. We’re looking forward to cool entries which take advantage of the capabilities of devices and AppStudio.
We have four categories:
All registered AppStudio users are welcome to participate. Prizes are $100 USD in each category, with the exception of Showcase.
AppStudio 4.0.5 has been released. It has a number of nice new features:
Enhancements and Fixes
Continue reading “AppStudio 4.0.5 released!”
BASIC is 50 years old today. The language has introduced millions of people to programming and is an important language for education and business.
The charm of BASIC, which it still very much has, is that it is easy to just start working and get results. There are very few concepts that need to be mastered before writing your first program, and the learning process to become an expert is a smooth and gradual one. It is a reliable way to get good results, whether you are teaching it or getting an application done.
I’ve hung out with some of the creators of famous BASICs: Tom Kurtz, Steve Wozniak and others. I have had the good luck to work on successful implementations of BASIC for Newton, Windows CE, Palm OS and now iOS, Android and Window Phone.
It’s been great to be able to keep the core of the language intact, while adding features to make it work well with the modern technologies of the web and mobile devices. It’s more powerful than ever and still easy to use.
Here are a few great articles for BASIC’s birthday:
Here’s a great question from the web board. What is it with the $(“# you will sometimes see in the code?
It’s a jQuery thing. Valid function names can start with a letter or certain special characters. “$” is a valid character to use in a function name. In this case, it’s the entire function name: $().
(jQuery is a utility library which is included in AppStudio apps)
jQuery’s $() function is a selector. It looks for elements in your app. It has a lot of different ways to select them:
http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/
You may see something like
$("#Button1").css("color","red")
The # means to look for an element with the id of “Button1”. What follows is the function to perform on the selected elements. There are a lot of functions that can be called:
http://api.jquery.com
By the way, you can also do the above as follows:
$(Button1).css("color","red")
Rather than using a selector, we reference the control directly.
AppStudio 4.0.4 has been released.
Nothing major in this one, but a number of useful enhancements and fixes. In particular, we think we have a solution for the double click problem caused by iScroll 5.
With the new Camera control, you can add the ability to capture pictures to your app without writing a line of code. It also has a much nicer camera icon than using a text field with an inputType of ‘file’.
AppStudio 4.0.3 has been released.
The cool new thing this time is a Camera control – making it much easier (and prettier!) to add a picture taking feature to your app.
Adding a YouTube video to an app has always been more work than needed. Now, instead of customizing an HTMLview to do the job, there is a dedicated YouTube control.
Simply drag the YouTube control onto the Design Screen, size it, and supply the YouTube Video ID. AppStudio does the rest.
We have found a problem with clicks on scrolling controls. It appears to be a bug in the new iScroll 5 library. The problem first appeared in 4.0.0: If you click on a scrolling list, a click event was fired for everything except Android.
The solution, in 4.0.1, was to add click:true to the scroller’s settings. This fixed the problem on Android, but resulted in 2 clicks firing elsewhere. We have opened an issue for this on iScroll’s bug tracker: https://github.com/cubiq/iscroll/issues/674
We will keep you posted!
Update: Fixed in 4.0.4.
AppStudio 4.0.2 has been released.
There are cool new controls for YouTube and Google Maps, plus some fixes.