Can I design an app for iPhone 4 & worry about sizing later?

[archer2009BUSknbj]

I want to do a mobile phone App for both iOS and Android.

But I'm still beginning in my learning of LiveCode

The App is pretty much an digital version of an existing book which I have in PDF Format but with added links to YouTube videos, Twitter Feeds, etc

If I pick the dimensions of an iPhone 4 as a starting size then I think I can pretty much do the App, but then how hard is it going to be to adapt this to a version that works on iPhone 5, iPad and all the other sizes of Android phone out there?

I've looked at external addons like MobiGUI, etc and never managed to get them to work correctly.
I'd like to use whatever comes built into LiveCode without external addons, but I don't know if it's possible.

On the backend, LiveCode is probably the only programming language I'll ever get my head around (subject to finding more tutorials and books on LiveCode), but on the front end of things LiveCode is so ancient looking, that so far every mobile app I've created using the built in controls looks like a throw back to my 10 year old Windows PDA, so Skinning is a must. I can make lots of pretty looking buttons in Xara and export them as PNG's and try and skin apps to look nicer.

I've decided iPhone 4 screen size is the minimum iPhone I want to cater for and similarly for Android about 480 by 800 pixels as a minimum.

As this is my first App which I hope to be good enough to put on the various app stores I don't mind if I have to work inefficiently and design multiple screen layouts for iPhone 4, 4S & 5 and then again for the various iPads, as long as there's an easy way to detect what device the App is being run on and what is the best screen size to use.

I really don't want to worry about external addons, mathematical formulas to resize buttons or positioning them so many percentage points from the edges, etc .. I just want to get on with designing something that is nice to use and easy on the eye.

Does this sound feasible with the current version of LiveCode?

[Simon]

You can try this:
http://forums.runrev.com/phpBB2/viewtop ... =8&t=14859
Easy to use, more complex tools are linked to in that post. You will have to add a "iphoneDeviceScale" line in there for retina displays.

Sometime soon the "resolution independence" and "themes" will be available so both your problems will go away.

Actually you should start with retina scaled controls so your images will look nice, scaling up gives the distorted images.

Simon

[archer2009BUSknbj]

Thanks - that scaling script is very impressive. I just created a screen with random buttons, boxes and some PNG buttons and they resize pretty well. I am extremely impressed.

Square PNG Buttons scale pretty well, circular ones look a little rough around the edges but I see increasing the quality setting to Good or Best helps - is there any reason not to have best?

[Simon]

I think "Best" requires more processing power, I couldn't tell the difference between "Good/Best" on my png's.

Simon

[Uli Kusterer]

If you really want to support all those sizes, it might be worth starting with a resizable stack. You can 'pin' edges of buttons, fields etc. to a window edge in the inspector. So if you design your stack so its contents resize correctly to any window size, it should fit on any screen size (most mobile phones and tablets only have one screen-size window).

That said, you might want to do something more complex for tablets than phones. You have so much more screen space on those that you may want to show additional areas with additional buttons in them etc. Or show two hierarchy levels at one (e.g. the split view in Mail.app on the iPad actually gets shown as two separate list screens on the iPhone). You can probably create a group containing those elements and then just show/hide the group using a bit of script at startup.

[Mag]

I really don't want to worry about external addons, mathematical formulas to resize buttons or positioning them so many percentage points from the edges, etc .. I just want to get on with designing something that is nice to use and easy on the eye.

Does this sound feasible with the current version of LiveCode?

In my experience (developing apps for OS X, iOS and Android recently), you have to deal with resize via code, no way to avoid this I think.

For mobile I work in @2x, then I put images in a separate stack (I choose "Good" quality in inspector for each image), when the app opens I resize the images and the controls.

PS
No problem to support iPhone with standard display, and I'm not sure you can avoid to support it if you want to publish on Apple Store.

[jacque]

Once you get the resizing figured out, also think a little about the content itself. Apple has recently begun rejecting apps that are basically just digital books. If the content can be created with their iBook app then they want you to use that instead. To be accepted into the App Store it must contain interactive content that iBook can't duplicate.

I don't want to discourage you because LiveCode does very well with this kind of material and it's a great way to learn programming. But if you can add movies, animation, interactive teaching games, or something else that makes it a little more than just a digital book you'll have a better chance at acceptance.