Pretty widgets

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hey all, I’m new to Corona and looking for a point in the right direction.

it seems the default SDK is extremely light on out-of-the-box widgets. I’m particularly interested in prettier version of a text box and option slider.  I cant believe the native test box is the only offering? Is this true or am I missing something?

I found a fork of a nice widget library here…

https://github.com/atanasster/framework-widget

It seems to have a nice implementation of an edit box, but I could find no documentation and it seems it hasn’t been actively developed in a couple years.

What are my options here?

#2

First of all, there are huge technical limitations as to why we only offer two text input methods. This isn’t going to change any time soon.  As far as other widgets, we decided to just do the core widgets that are needed (buttons, switches, sliders and so on). If you need a widget we don’t support you can:

  1. Build it yourself (and of course share it with the community if you want)

  2. Put in a feature request at http://feedback.coronalabs.com

  3. If you want to change how one of our widgets works, you can download the Lua source from them from our GitHub repo at: https://github.com/coronalabs/framework-widget and modify them to your needs.

If you want to change how one of our widgets works like a slider, they are completely skinable. Instead of a circular slider, make it a shield or a fireball.

The native.newTextField() has plenty of control too. It still has to sit on top of everything, but it can be inserted into groups for easy moving around. It can be made invisible and you can put it on top of any design that you want. We did a tutorial on making a widget.newTextField() that takes you through this skinning process. This is basically what the widget library above does. It wraps their skinning around native.newTextField().

I don’t believe it’s being maintained, but the code was in pretty good shape I think. We of course can’t provide support for it.

Rob

#3

Welp, I guess I know what my first order of business is… to take that code and bring it up to date :slight_smile:

#4

First of all, there are huge technical limitations as to why we only offer two text input methods. This isn’t going to change any time soon.  As far as other widgets, we decided to just do the core widgets that are needed (buttons, switches, sliders and so on). If you need a widget we don’t support you can:

  1. Build it yourself (and of course share it with the community if you want)

  2. Put in a feature request at http://feedback.coronalabs.com

  3. If you want to change how one of our widgets works, you can download the Lua source from them from our GitHub repo at: https://github.com/coronalabs/framework-widget and modify them to your needs.

If you want to change how one of our widgets works like a slider, they are completely skinable. Instead of a circular slider, make it a shield or a fireball.

The native.newTextField() has plenty of control too. It still has to sit on top of everything, but it can be inserted into groups for easy moving around. It can be made invisible and you can put it on top of any design that you want. We did a tutorial on making a widget.newTextField() that takes you through this skinning process. This is basically what the widget library above does. It wraps their skinning around native.newTextField().

I don’t believe it’s being maintained, but the code was in pretty good shape I think. We of course can’t provide support for it.

Rob

#5

Welp, I guess I know what my first order of business is… to take that code and bring it up to date :slight_smile: