[Disclaimer: This blog has no intentions to be a definitive opinion on Lua or Corona development. It is just an opinion, under the perspective of a non-professional developer, working for the first time with both technologies. If you find anything wrong with the expressed opinions, please feel free to comment and I will revise the text.]
Last week, with the announcement of the new beta SDK from Ansca, I took a hard decision in reviewing my entire app (I had it 60% done), and re-start the coding, replacing the dozens of text files, for a SQLite database (thanks Ansca for bring SQLite to the SDK!).
I spent a few days reviewing the interface (check below how it is as of today), as well as handling some bugs or “unusual things”, that runs well in the simulator, but not in the device. For example, when user select a place, I get the place name, for example “Colonia Juarez”, as well as the file name for the place image (in this case “ColoniaJuarez”. In the same folder, I have the image files, which included “coloniaJuarez”. When running in the simulator, I got some warning messages informing that Corona “assumed” that “ColoniaJuarez” (the file name variable) is the same as “coloniaJuarez” (real file name), but the code ran perfectly. When I went to the device, I kept getting blank images. Now that I found the error, it seems a very simple thing but, I spent a few hours with alerts and “prints” trying to figure out what was happening.
Buttons in the interface mean: 1) More options (which shows the last 3 buttons), 2) Call place, 3) Directions to place and 4) Share info. Blank (future) menu in the bottom will allow users to list places by name, sort a place and discover the closest place to visit
Lastly, I cannot say how grateful I am for people like Scott Powers and Mike Hart, from the Corona forums. They keep helping me with my questions, and this app would take much more time to be developed without them.
I will share some code in the next posting.
Alex