From the Forum — Issue #15

11 April 2014

From the Forum — Issue #15

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!

1. Two in a nest…

Using widget.newTableView() within business apps can be a very versatile way to expand functionality and provide some serious user interaction. Having these features in your app extends the way you can provide data to users, in a visual format.
Developer Ksan started a discussion around the idea of a nested table view module containing a large number of values within the widget table view itself. The collective Corona community — with special mention to primoz.cerar — responded and helped to craft a very extensible solution for a complete nested table view.

Hover over to the original thread to learn more and grab the sample code:

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/43124-collapsable-nested-tableview-demo/

2. Search bar

Let’s continue with our theme of experimental data maintenance brought up by developer Ksan. He pondered whether the “collective brain” of Corona developers could generate some strong code for a Lua-powered search bar, and he offered up the original skeleton framework. Soon he received some assistance from our helpful community to refine the logic behind it.

Take a look at the original thread to see how you can add search functionality to your app:

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/41908-lets-work-together-to-build-a-nice-searchbar-sample-app/

3. Loading remote images in the proper order

We haven’t discussed the display.loadRemoteImage() function before, but it can be an incredibly useful tool, helping to keep build sizes low when prototyping and ensuring that your image assets are the most up-to-date.

One useful implementation is an app with a dynamic product listing, for example a database-powered recipe app. Having images that can be updated after submission to the marketplace can be very useful in this scenario.

As such, Corona user pedro.perina was looking for a logical method to load images inside a widget.newTableView(). When using this widget, rows that are “offscreen” will not render until being moved “onscreen” for purposes of memory efficiency. Thus, massaging the behavior of image loading is essential.

Flip over to the original thread, see the code in action, and provide some of your own insight!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/38541-loading-async-images-and-tableview/

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Software, 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: @pancsoftware. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!