AppStudio Blog

This blog post best viewed in Safari or Android – you’ll see a Cheezburger below.

Emoji are extended characters that are built into mobile devices. There are hundreds of them: arrows, letters, roman numerals, pictures of food, building, transportation, flags, animals. And of course, happy faces, sad faces, crying faces. It’s easy to use them in AppStudio apps.
Continue reading “Can I has cheezburger? Emoji!”

In some cases, you will need your customer to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA) before using your app. AppStudio 3 makes this easy to do.

Put the text of your agreement into EULA in Project Properties. The text can be any length and be formatted as HTML.

When your app starts, it checks to see if there is a EULA. If there is and it has not been agreed to, the EULA is presented as the first screen the user sees:

The user has the choice of agreeing to the EULA or hitting the Home button to exit. If the user agrees, the EULA disappears and the app continues normally. Next time the app is started, it remembers that the EULA has been agreed to and does not put up the screen again.

It remembers whether the EULA has been agreed to by setting a entry in localStorage.

You can check the value if you need as follows:

if localStorage.EULA=False Then
  MsgBox "Please agree to EULA to unlock all features of this app.
End If

There is no way to stop someone from rotating their device. The screen is refreshes and your app probably doesn’t fit anymore. There are several ways to deal with this:

1. Calculate new sizes and positions for all the controls and move them around.
2. Compile using PhoneGap, setting its orientation preference to not rotate your app.
3. Take advantage of the opportunity to display something else – like a status report.
4. Use the new Orientation control to ask your user to rotate back.

In this post, we’ll discuss the last option.
Continue reading “AppStudio 3: Orientation Control”

When planning for AppStudio 3, we realized we had to improve moving, resizing and hiding controls. There was little consistency: jQuery Mobile controls working differently than iWebKit, the names of the objects to be altered was inconsistent, jQeury Mobile 1.3 broke some stuff and certain operations that worked on Chrome and the desktop did not work at all on some versions of Mobile Safari.

Here’s what we did.
Continue reading “AppStudio 3: Moving, resizing and hiding controls”