Android splash screen question

[yachris]

Hello,

The Android Release Notes say that the splash-screen setting is for non-commercial use only. I tried it with an app I'm building with the full version of LiveCode, and sure enough, it doesn't get shown.

However it does get shown when deploying to iOS -- so this seems inconsistent. Is this going to change for Android, or will you always have to "roll your own" splash screen?

Thanks!

[Mark]

yachris ,

Do you mean the LiveCode Release Notes for Antroid or the actual Android SDK Release Notes?

If the LC splash screen says "for non-commercial use only" then you have a personal license for LC for Android.

What exactly gets shown on iOS? A splash screen? A message on the splash screen saying "for non-commercial use only"?

I think that custom splash screens are only shown if you own a commercial license.

Mark

[yachris]

Hi Mark,

I was referring to RunRev's "Android Release Notes". I have the official, full licensed version of LiveCode.

What I was referring to is the field in the "Android" tab of the "Standalone Application Settings" window. It has a field titled "Splash" which lets you put in a path to an image. This image is shown when the app starts up, while the setup is under way.

The puzzling line in the "Android Release Notes" says, with respect to the "Splash" image is "The image file to use in the personal and educational splash screens (this is not used when building with a commercial license)."

This is contrary to what happens (and is said in the iOS release notes) to what happens on iOS... the image gets used properly there.

Clearer?

[jacque]

This came up on the mailing list too, and right now the splash isn't showing for any of us. The release notes aren't clear whether commercial developers should be able to show a splash, but I'd think we should be able to. So I think it's a bug.

[Mark]

Yup, I get it, yachris. Like Jacque, I think that it should be possible to always show a pre-set splash window. I assume you have a commercial license. If you have a personal license, you get a RunRev/LiveCode splash window with your own picture added to it. In commercial licenses, this RR/LC splash window isn't shown. On iOS, it is tradition to start an app by showing a splash screen while the app starts. This might be different on Android, I still have to try this (I have installed the Android SDK only a few days ago). If splash screens aren't common on the Android platform, that might explain the difference in current behaviour on the two platforms. I hope this gets fixed soon.

[jacque]

That's a good point, Mark. I almost never see a splash on Android except on some games and the occasional app that needs time to retreive internet data (WeatherBug, for example.) The ones that do have a splash usually also have a "loading" indicator. I suspect we could just make the first card of our stack a "splash" image, wait a second or two, and then move to the actual working card. That would also be the only way to show a loading indicator, since a splash image wouldn't be scriptable.

[Gene]

This is good stuff. May I thicken the plot? My question would be: is it even possible to have a loading indicator in an Android app? I would spend serious time creating a progress bar just to watch it go if I knew how to poll the internal loading progress from the device/app and map it onto my progress indicator.

Personally, I have not seen a loading indicator on any Android app, including the splash screen, so maybe it isn't even doable in the Android world. The exception is, of course, in internet operations. However, if it is possible to have hooks into the loading state of various operations, such as from card to card, or when loading images or videos (when we have them), and so forth, I would take a serious look at the possibilities. Maybe some research into the Android SDK itself would provide some answers about whether or not this sort of thing is possible.

[jacque]

I just got an answer to my bug report about the splash screen, and there is apparently no automatic way to provide that in Android as there is in iOS (which may explain why so few apps have them.) The few that do are likely managing it via their code. We could do the same by making the first card of the stack into the "splash", running any setup scripts, and then moving to the actual main card.

I have never seen a progress indicator that showed real percentage-based loading progress on the splash. Instead there is a generic loader, usually four boxes that hilite serially. That would be very easy to do in LiveCode by simply cycling through the graphics, buttons, or whatever we're using and changing the background color of each.

My test stack takes a few seconds to load initially so I may implement this method.

[BarrySumpter]

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[jacque]

I'm pretty sure it has to work, since the trial and non-commerical versions of LiveCode do it. How were you scripting the first-card, and how did it fail exactly?

If I get a chance I'll try it and see what happens.

[BarrySumpter]

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[jacque]

I did some tinkering, it works fine. I used card 1 as the splash and card 2 as the "main" card, but I'm sure it would work if you use the mainstack as the splash and a substack as the main content. The action needs to happen on openCard, if you do it any earlier than that the card hasn't been drawn on screen yet. Maybe in your tests you used a preOpenCard or an openStack handler? That would make the first card appear to be skipped.

I made four buttons on card 1 and wrote a simple handler that loops through them, setting one to opaque so its color fill would show. This emulates an Android "progress" widget and also gives the card something to do while it waits. If this were for a real stack, I'd do my pre-processing at the same time.

Here's the script of card 1:

Code: Select all

local sDotNum
local sStartTime

on openCard
  put the seconds into sStartTime
  put 0 into sDotNum
  showProgress
end openCard

on showProgress
  if there is no btn "dot 1" then exit showProgress
  if the seconds - sStartTime < 5 then
    put (sDotNum mod 4) + 1 into sDotNum
    repeat with x = 1 to 4
      set the opaque of btn ("dot"&& x) to false
    end repeat
    set the opaque of btn ("dot"&& sDotNum) to true
    send "showProgress" to me in .5 seconds
  else
    go cd 2
  end if
end showProgress

It works in the emulator, which is the only place I tried it.

[BarrySumpter]

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[BarrySumpter]

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[BarrySumpter]

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