I’m going to write a few apps for deployment on my iPhone (iPhone X). Most likely never to the Apple App store. Just for personal use.
I’m using an iMac, OS X 10.12.6, LC 9.0.0 Community.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been going through the user manual. All of it.
Also lurking and reading posts on the forums.
I’ve come to realize a few things. (Please correct me where my understanding is wrong!)
- A LC IOS app is, by definition, a standalone. Right?
- A standalone cannot “self-modify”; in other words, you can not input (or save only?) new data into it. (When you re-launch the app, it will be in the same, previous, original state.) Right?
- Except there are two ways to get around this: 1- Use the “Splash Stack” approach. (BTW I first learned about splash stack in reading up on the DataGrid upon which I’ll rely heavily for my apps). One thing is not clear: does this approach really mean that data (in the “main stack”, not the “splash stack”) can be updated, added to, edited, deleted, saved, etc, etc???
- The other approach (which is much more intuitive to me) is to store the data in “external” files. Well, certainly, on OS X, that’s clear. There is lots of information (in the LC docs and site, lessons, etc.) on how to do this, which commands to use, etc. Right.
- But what about IOS??? How is data structured under IOS? In LC, do I use the same commands (as for OS X)? Such as “Open file “ABC” for write”, for example? By accident, I stumbled upon the Dictionary entry for “specialFolderPath”: there is a bit of information there about the IOS file system; but very limited. The User Guide has a section entitled “File Types, Application Signatures & File Ownership” with four sub-sections: Windows, OS X, Mac OS X Classic and Linux. Not a word on IOS (or Android)! Question: what is the best source of information for this? Apple?
- In this day and age, I would have thought that a logical place to keep “external” files would be on the iCloud Drive (if in the IOS environment). There is not a single reference to iCloud in the User Guide. I’m not looking in the right place, right? Where should I be looking for this?
- I was very surprised to find that the User Guide does NOT contain a section entitled “LC and IOS” (or Android, for that matter). Is there another manual that I don’t know about??? I have very basic questions in my mind; for instance: on my iPhone, buttons behave differently (in some apps) when they’re “tapped” and when they’re “pressed”. How is this handled in LC??? I searched the Dictionary for “press” but got nowhere.
- Another question, very basic, I’m sure: in the 9.0.0 IDE, when creating a new stack, there is no option for a size of “iPhone X”. (Or 7 or 8, for that matter). How important is this??? Is it OK if I create a stack at the default size and then resize it myself? Am I missing something by not picking one of the specific sizes???