From the Forum — Issue #105

08 January 2016

From the Forum — Issue #105

Welcome to the latest installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.

Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!

Calendar view widget right around the corner!

Folks have been looking for some high-octane, flexible, scalable widgets to hang their hats on. It can be tough to work on ground-breaking apps while still working on creating a solid backbone of a structure. Corona has open sourced their widget library, so that is a great foundation to start from, but it can only go so far.

Another Corona developer has grasped the baton and taken off towards the finish line, by developing and releasing a fantastic, full-featured Calendar widget that you can incorporate today. It’s a pretty nifty little module that you can grab right now. Head on over to the original thread to grab the download link.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/60944-new-calendar-view/

Conceiving of sheets by pixels

Getting all of our apps to appear correctly on every device can feel like a losing battle at times. One of the main keys here, is to remember the differences and similarities between the display.newImage() and display.newImageRect() APIs.

It’s something that still trips me up from time to time, but thank goodness we have Rob Miracle to set us straight. In the below thread, he goes into great detail about what kinds of apps would benefit from Adaptive scaling, as opposed to

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/60914-sheetcontentwidth-and-sheetcontentheight/

PDF generation within Corona

I highlighted options surrounding PDF use and production in previous weeks, but with a tip from a friend, I’m able to bring a pretty useful library to the fore and let the community know it exists!

The link to the module that can help generate PDFs is in the original thread. According to the Corona developer that posted it, the module can “pull background images in, on which you can overlay text using grid coordinates, and so you have some proforma style capability.” And the best part? It doesn’t need Enterprise!

Click through to the original thread to grab the module, and don’t forget to say thanks!
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/52506-anyone-get-airprint-to-work-with-ios/

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Interactive, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancinteractive. Check out his new game Segreta on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Amazon devices.