The easiest way to make mobile and desktop apps.
The question came up on the web board: Can I split my AppStudio app into more than one program, and have the parts call each other? Sounds like a good topic for a blog post!
The answer is yes. The benefits are simplification and splitting large apps into smaller ones. You can even share data. Here are the details:
Continue reading “Calling other AppStudio apps”
It’s easy to make a native Android app with AppStudio and PhoneGap Build. However, since it is a native app, you cannot use the Chrome Debugger in the same way as you would with a Web App. Here are a couple of tips how to do it:
Continue reading “Debugging PhoneGap Apps on Android”
By now, most of you have figured out how to use the Chrome or Safari Debugger to look at your app while it is running. (If not, read this!) But did you know you can also debug your app when it is running on a device?
Debugging an Android device on Windows
You will need Chrome 32 or later on both the device and the desktop. Your device needs to be connected by its USB cable.
Follow the instructions here. You will probably need to install the USB driver for your device. Once it is installed, type about:inspect into Chrome’s url bar and you will connect. The debugger will work just like the Chrome Desktop Debugger.
PhoneGap apps work too!
Debugging an Android device on Mac OS
Just like on Windows, except there are no drivers to install.
Debugging an iOS device on Mac OS
Connect your iOS device to your Mac using a USB cable. In Safari, go into the Advanced screen in Preferences. Turn on “Show Develop menu in menu bar”.
Then, from the Develop menu, choose your device and the app you want to debug.
More information is here.
Debugging an iOS device on Windows
Use the NSBApp Debugger.
Start it using the “NSBApp Debugger” in the Run menu. It will then recognize your app in these cases:
1. It is running in a desktop browser, after having been loaded from nsbapp.com.
2. It is running on a device as a web app, after having been loaded from nsbapp.com.
3. It is running on a device as a PhoneGap App. The project property “NSBApp Debugger” must be set to True.
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.
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’.
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 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”