Can (or will) Corona be modified to support Chromebooks?
It would seem changes are minimal but not having a touchscreen might pose some issues?
I have not heard of any intentions to support Chromebooks. It’s basically a web browser. The OS is based on browsing the Internet. I don’t know that it has the necessary resources to run the simulator on.
Rob
Check these two links Rob - https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps, https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7021273?hl=en-GB and https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/index.html.
It would seem Google is rolling out the Play Store to Chromebooks this year. It would obviously open up corona apps to more/new markets.
Google says “As of Chrome OS version M53, all Android apps that don’t explicitly require the android.hardware.touchscreen feature will also work on Chrome OS devices that support the android.hardware.faketouch feature. However, if you want your app to work on all Chromebooks in the best possible way, go to your manifest file and adjust the settings so that the android.hardware.touchscreen feature is not required, as shown in the following example. You should also review your mouse and keyboard interactions.”
I assume as Corona already supports keyboard/mouse input that this could be implemented relatively easy?
Oh, you’re asking for apps you make to run on Chromebooks. I thought you were asking about running Corona SDK on Chromebooks. These are two totally different things.
The best thing is to visit the feedback site and create an entry if there isn’t one already and get it voted up. This might not take that much work to support as opposed to trying to get the simulator to run there. But if interest is low, it will be hard for me to sell this to engineering.
Rob
I would say that this should be a priority with Google Play shipping on all new 2017 Chromebooks… Otherwise Corona built apps could get a bad reputation if they break/don’t work properly.
I’m with you on that with my 3 votes!
Has there been any progress on this request?
We have not had time to look at this. Has any one tried?
Rob
Google says “As of Chrome OS version M53, all Android apps that don’t explicitly require the android.hardware.touchscreen feature will also work on Chrome OS devices that support the android.hardware.faketouch feature. However, if you want your app to work on all Chromebooks in the best possible way, go to your manifest file and adjust the settings so that the android.hardware.touchscreen feature is not required, as shown in the following example. You should also review your mouse and keyboard interactions.”
Based on that Rob would current Corona apps work? We cannot change the manifest file ourselves so you would need to confirm.
I guess that means it’s already supported! Anyone tried the solution yet?
ok - so we got feedback on Chromebooks from Google Play. We then tried it using an Acer R11. Here is the outcome:
Good News:
Our app does run, even prior to the change in permission as indicated in the link
Bad News/Problems:
-
We have a place in our game, where you need to enter a number into a native textfield. When the player tries to enter information into the text field, if the user tries to click into the textfield then type, it won’t allow user to enter any text. However, if the user where to tap on the textfield first (on the touch screen), then the user CAN enter text as you would expect. This problem continued to exist even after we set the android.hardware.touchscreen flag.
-
Another weird problem we ran into is that when we resize the window on Chrome, the game restarts. Here are the words from Google, which we fully observed:
When reviewing the title on Chromebooks, problems were observed while resizing the app window (switching between portrait or landscape orientations, or transitioning between windowed and maximized sizes):
• App/game restarts upon resizing, causing user to lose progress
Apps should handle dynamic window resizing by utilizing onConfigChange and the android:configChanges=“ScreenSize” activity element, or by supporting Android N multi-window resizing. For more info: https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/index.html#leverage , https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/multi-window.html
- Lastly, our game didn’t scale properly when user changes the aspect ratio on the window. I am wondering if there is a way to LOCK the aspect ratio on Chromebooks such that even as the player resizes the window, the UI won’t break…
I think we’ll need someone from Corona to weigh in to sort out some of these stuff.
I have not heard of any intentions to support Chromebooks. It’s basically a web browser. The OS is based on browsing the Internet. I don’t know that it has the necessary resources to run the simulator on.
Rob
Check these two links Rob - https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps, https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7021273?hl=en-GB and https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/index.html.
It would seem Google is rolling out the Play Store to Chromebooks this year. It would obviously open up corona apps to more/new markets.
Google says “As of Chrome OS version M53, all Android apps that don’t explicitly require the android.hardware.touchscreen feature will also work on Chrome OS devices that support the android.hardware.faketouch feature. However, if you want your app to work on all Chromebooks in the best possible way, go to your manifest file and adjust the settings so that the android.hardware.touchscreen feature is not required, as shown in the following example. You should also review your mouse and keyboard interactions.”
I assume as Corona already supports keyboard/mouse input that this could be implemented relatively easy?
Oh, you’re asking for apps you make to run on Chromebooks. I thought you were asking about running Corona SDK on Chromebooks. These are two totally different things.
The best thing is to visit the feedback site and create an entry if there isn’t one already and get it voted up. This might not take that much work to support as opposed to trying to get the simulator to run there. But if interest is low, it will be hard for me to sell this to engineering.
Rob
I would say that this should be a priority with Google Play shipping on all new 2017 Chromebooks… Otherwise Corona built apps could get a bad reputation if they break/don’t work properly.
I’m with you on that with my 3 votes!
Is there any more news on the Chromebook front? We used ARC to convert our Corona built .apk to a ChromeOS compatible zip file but have run into this issue:
When calling requestExit to close the app, the app closes, then the OS immediately restarts the app. (We’re thinking the OS is interpreting it as a crash and is reopening it in an attempt to smooth out the user experience.)
Any ideas on how we should close the app?
Has there been any progress on this request?
We have not had time to look at this. Has any one tried?
Rob