Author: George Henne

AppStudio 4 comes with jQuery Mobile 1.4. It has over 50 icons you can use with your controls. If that’s not enough, you can add custom icons of your own.

To help you choose, there’s a handy picker that appears in most cases. The icons are:
action, arrow-d-l, arrow-d-r, arrow-d, arrow-l,

arrow-r, arrow-u-l, arrow-u-r, arrow-u, audio,

calendar, camera, carat-d, carat-l, carat-r,

carat-u, check, clock, custom, grid,

mail, eye, gear, heart, home,

info, bullets, bars, navigation, lock,

search, location, minus, forbidden, edit,

user, phone, plus, power, recycle,

forward, refresh, shop, comment, star,

tag, back, video, alert, delete.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: jQuery Mobile Icon improvements”

AppStudio 4 brings a number of improvements to the Code Window. Since that’s where programmers spend most of their time, it was long overdue. Some of the issues we addressed were among the oldest on our list.

Continue reading “AppStudio 4: Improvements to the Code Window”

AppStudio 4 brings some handy new functions. Each of these saves you time: they replace several lines of sometimes messy code in your app.

Read on to see how to use Format, IndexOf, Push and Splice.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: Some handy new functions”

One of the handy gestures you can do on a mobile device that you cannot do on the desktop is shake the entire device. It’s a handy way for the user to tell your app to clear the screen, discard the current transaction, start a new game, etc.

To do this, you need to take measurements on the accelerometer and detect a shaking motion. This is a bit complex to do: AppStudio 4 adds a library to make this easy.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: Shake your booty!”

AppStudio 4.0 allows your mobile app to share data with other computers using Dropbox.

(If you haven’t used Dropbox, it’s an easy to use cloud based filing system. It is very nicely integrated with Windows and Mac: it becomes just another folder on your system. Dropbox takes care of all the behind the scenes file transferring, and it’s free with a reasonable amount of storage.)

You can create, read, update and delete files in your Dropbox folder using AppStudio. This makes it a powerful tool for synching data between your device and the desktop. It even works offline: the files you create or update will be synced with the desktop next time there is a data connection.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: Working with Dropbox”

One of the hardest things to explain to new AppStudio users has always been “Why is it so hard to show an image in a PictureBox?”

PictureBox is based in the HTML5 Canvas element. To display an image on it, you used to need the following code:

'Pre AppStudio 4.0 code
pb = PictureBox1.getContext("2d")
myImage=new Image()

Sub Main
  myImage.src="mario.jpg"
End Sub

Function myImage_onload()
  pb.drawImage(myImage,0,0)
End Function

Since an image can take some time to load, it is done asynchronously. When the load is complete, unload is called to finish the display.

In AppStudio 4.0, it’s much simpler, using the new addImage() function:
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: PictureBox images are way easier!”

Before AppStudio 4, sounds were played using the Audio control. This had a few drawbacks: it was a bit complicated to set up, there was a noticeable delay before the sound started, only one sound could play at a time and it would insist on putting Play/Resume buttons on the screen. These made sounds useless for many applications, including user feedback and gaming.

In AppStudio 4, we have added a new function, PlaySound:

  PlaySound("Bubbles.wav")

It plays the sound immediately, with nothing appearing on the screen. Sound files can be .wav or .mp3 format.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: Sounds just got better!”

AppStudio 4 has a number of features to make your life easier. We looked for ways to make code easier to write and understand.

First up is GetJSON. This function is used to get information from a web service. There are many web services available: making use of these is a great way to connect your app to the outside world. The Programmable Web lists over 10,000 web API’s you can use. APIs exist for almost everything: sports, games, the stock market, weather, inventory checks at retailers, Yahoo, Twitter, FaceBook and Google.
Continue reading “AppStudio 4: GetJSON() makes Web Services Easy!”