From the Forum — Issue #64

20 March 2015

From the Forum — Issue #64

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. A flurry of activity

The Flurry module is pretty popular among Corona SDK developers. Flurry has a lot of options to help us track and identify different app usage characteristics across many different deployments. That is all well and good, but having all that data and collating all those metrics is a whole lot of numbers, unless you can get access to it easily.

That’s where the below forum post comes in. Flurrylitics is an app that allows you to access your Flurry data from your iOS device simply and effectively. Head over to the original thread and check out the low-down on the app itself, and if you have any suggestions for improvements, be sure to post them for the developers to learn from!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/55504-access-flurry-analytics-from-iphone

2. Random for random’s sake!

Many times, developers will openly ruminate on the possible solution to a, seemingly simple, problem of logic. Reading through the written conversations is always amusing and very often enlightening. A smart Corona developer will read through these threads and learn more than they could watching 2 hours of YouTube tutorials!

Such was the case in the below thread, where one developer wondered how one could come up with a random point within the circumference of a circle. Probably thinking he would get one or two responses at best, what followed was a four-way conversation between some of the most talented Corona developers around, yielding some very interesting methods to derive the intended goal. Do yourself a favor and check it out at the forum post below. And if you have your own method, clock the speed and see if it can compete with what was shared!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/55561-random-point-within-a-circle/

3. You think those megabytes grow on trees?

Sharing screen grabs from Corona-built apps is a great way to encourage word-of-mouth promotion about your app. Giving your users easy ways to get pictures into Facebook posts and Twitter updates amounts to free advertising and lets people recommend your app to their circles.

The fatal flaw in this plan is trying to get users to upload giant files that hog all kinds of bandwidth. Sharing a 5 megabyte file for your win-screen when your user is very load-conscious is a surefire way to turn a positive interaction into a negative. One Corona developer had the same thought, and asked if there was a way to get a smaller image consistently. Check the below thread to see the response, and rest assured, it’s the right way to perform this mechanic.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/55563-anyway-to-reduce-image-quality-for-internet-load

About Alex

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