MobGUI rewritten for both commercial and community

[splash21]

The new MobGUI plugin is nearing completion. It's been completely rewritten to use LiveCode's behavior features. It's still a commercial plugin, it is NOT GPL, but it WILL run on both the commercial and community editions of LiveCode. In addition, the source of any controls and behaviors added to your project are editable by you, allowing tweaking and fine tuning of the code. So far, all the new versions of the native mobile controls (browser, player, scroller, input, multiline) seem to be working fine on both android and iOS. The property palettes for these controls have also been hooked up and are working, so now I can start adding the additional LC custom controls. An iOS7 style switch has been added as the first test control - it's not complete yet, but it does function in the IDE/sim/device. Now that the behaviors version of the plugin seems to be 'behaving', it should be fairly easy to add the LC custom controls and expand the palette. Preview versions can be downloaded from http://mobgui.com. The target is to launch before Christmas. In addition, a set of icons has been commissioned to be bundled with the plugin and I also plan on creating TTF fonts from the svg icons. This way, you can use the fonts on buttons, fields, etc. and they will scale automatically for different screen densities without having to worry about including / referencing varying images. I've not got a definitive date for the icons yet, but should have more info this coming week.

Feedback at this stage is very welcome

[MarcVanCauwenberghe]

This is a very welcome christmas present.
Thank you.

[splash21]

You're welcome - It is long overdue, but almost finished! Some notes;

The controls list can be scrolled with;

• the right mouse button
• holding CMD (CTRL for Win/Linux) and the left button
• using the vertical scrollbar type object to the left of the controls

Mobile browser URL and mobile player filename can both be set to initial local files for example;
[documents]/HTML/local.html
[engine]/Movies/Test.mov

Any folder enclosed with square brackets at the beginning of the path will be replaced with the specialFolderPath value. (Still doesn't work for browser in the simulator, but fine on real device).

I'm adding a checkbox to hide the button background, but still keep it clickable as a lot of the time iOS7 buttons are just text, allowing other content underneath to show through the semi-transparent navbar/ etc.

[splash21]

Just updated the preview. It now includes;

All native mobile controls.
LC custom controls : button, switch, slider, navbar (in progress)

[robl]

I am really liking the new MobGUI. It's much cleaner and simpler to maintain an app using the new pre-release version. Behaviors are certainly an elegant solution.

Question though, regarding the new MobGUI button controls. It looks like there is no support to use icons on the buttons, or am I missing something? Do you plan to include icon support for buttons on the final release? I read you intend to use custom fonts with icon symbols for labels, but I'm thinking more for custom icons that I may have already in *.png format.

[williamdesmet]

I like it so far!
I noticed on the button the default text color on 'Touched state' = RGB 179,179,179.
Isn't that the wrong color? It must be something like RGB 197,221,248 (this is what I use now).
For the default blue I now use RGB 21,126,251. Yours is RGB 0,128,155.
Same for the grey colors.
What are the correct ones? And where can I find these?

[splash21]

Thanks for the feedback so far...

Robi, icons are planned as well as fonts. There are various tricks I've used in the past like setting a button caption to one character and then setting it's image source to an image id - which can be a referenced image....

William, I just picked some colors that I thought looked good - are there official ones?? The template controls are contained in a card in the plugin - a mechanism to easily update them would allow you to easily customize controls with your own preferences. Cloning the card could in effect create a new theme - keeping the originals intact and then tweaking the copies


I've just updated the download again with some functionality on the main card : resizing the stack. I've added a list of common device screen sizes that are selectable by dragging a slider - this could be good for testing to see what an app looks like on the various display sizes.

* the stack name and width/height are saved by pressing RETURN or ENTER while in the field.

[rdmiller]

John,

What do you suggest I do for an existing mobile app that uses the previous version of MobGUI to create/manage controls and to resize the app? I'd like to take this app and rework it under LC6.5 to take advantage of LC's resolution independence, while also using the new MobGUI. I'm assuming I need to remove everything associated with the old MobGUI first. What is the easiest way to do that?

Thanks,
Richard

[splash21]

Richard - I haven't converted a stack from old to new (yet), but I would think the easiest way would be to remove the library stack completely from your file to get front scripts / library scripts out of the way. It should then be a question of copying code from the existing orphaned controls to new controls. Just back everything up first

[rdmiller]

Thanks, John