Windows OS and Widgets.

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi all, I’ve now finished planning / learning stages and I’m about to begin production for my first (proper) Indie title…

Obviously we’re (hopefully) not far off Windows compatibility, which will be great.

I seem to remember though… The VIP opportunity, where Corona were asking Developers if they would like to submit their apps/games for the Windows BETA showcase. - One of the prerequisites for that, was that your app didn’t use the widget-framework.

As I’m sure you’ll understand, planning is important when you’re under-staffed, under-funded and under pressure. I basically want to ask if it’s wise to build my game with widgets (buttons mainly), and if there’s (and there always has been to be fair) a problem porting widgets over to Windows, is it possible that you might deprecate the API altogether?

Regards

#2

Our widgets are highly themed for iOS and Android.  I’m not familiar with Window Phone OS, but it’s also possible that the widgets themselves don’t make much sense in Window’s world.  I think there is also a case where the intent, since Window 8 Phone is currently implemented as Corona Cards, that you would use native widgets instead of Corona widgets. for UI pieces.

If you’re just wanting buttons, to be honest, widget.newButton() is frequently as much code as doing it by hand if you don’t need to have pressed/default states and not much more code to implement it with states. 

Widgets are a long term feature of Corona SDK, but they are not a high priority item to make available to Windows 8 Phone build.s

#3

[quote name=“Rob Miracle” post=“258717” timestamp=“1407002406”]Widgets are a long term feature of Corona SDK, but they are not a high priority item to make available to Windows 8 Phone build.s[/quote] This would be a mistake IMHO. Windows 8 Phone has a much higher enterprise usage percentage as compared to its consumer uptake. In other words, if anything, Corona Labs should try to make its product more appealing to the business app developers targeting Windows 8 Phone. Who is the target audience for Corona SDK on Windows 8 Phone?

#4

And we agree.  But as our Windows 8 phone solution exists now you have access to real native widgets (If I understand correctly).  With limited engineering resources, we have to focus on things that the product needs first, like getting the frame rate up, getting audio working, custom fonts, making sure native and Lua can talk to each other, etc.   If you didn’t have access to the native widgets, I’m sure porting them would be higher on the list of things to do.

#5

Oooh… access to native widgets ha? That changes the whole deal of course. This sounds great!!! 

Of course, it would mean our write once & deploy on all platforms deal would not be true anymore. Perhaps somewhere down the road the widgets could be extended to identify the platform as W8P and call the native equivalents behind the scene so we don’t need to change our code to run on W8P. Just an idea. 

#6

Are the widgets written in 100% Lua code? If yes, what would stop this code from running on any version of CoronaSDK?

I understand that you wouldn’t have a Windows theme, unless that was added.

#7

Widgets are 100% LUA so in theory they should work on W8P. Having said that let’s not forget that in Corona SDK everything runs on OpenGL and that W8P does not do OpenGL… So CL must be doing something different to support W8P and this may mean that not everything may be the same across platforms on Day 1 when W8P support becomes available. At least that’s my speculative read of the tea leaves. Very likely to be completely wrong.

#8

As I said above, we can only do so much so fast.  Some things have to be prioritized over others.  Yes Widget’s are 100% Lua, but we are still porting all the APIs and they probably will run at some point.  I’m not privy to that schedule.  I do know we would have to create theme files and there may be behavioral things like how switches work that would need to be coded to try and mimic the native widgets. 

Rob

#9

Our widgets are highly themed for iOS and Android.  I’m not familiar with Window Phone OS, but it’s also possible that the widgets themselves don’t make much sense in Window’s world.  I think there is also a case where the intent, since Window 8 Phone is currently implemented as Corona Cards, that you would use native widgets instead of Corona widgets. for UI pieces.

If you’re just wanting buttons, to be honest, widget.newButton() is frequently as much code as doing it by hand if you don’t need to have pressed/default states and not much more code to implement it with states. 

Widgets are a long term feature of Corona SDK, but they are not a high priority item to make available to Windows 8 Phone build.s

#10

[quote name=“Rob Miracle” post=“258717” timestamp=“1407002406”]Widgets are a long term feature of Corona SDK, but they are not a high priority item to make available to Windows 8 Phone build.s[/quote] This would be a mistake IMHO. Windows 8 Phone has a much higher enterprise usage percentage as compared to its consumer uptake. In other words, if anything, Corona Labs should try to make its product more appealing to the business app developers targeting Windows 8 Phone. Who is the target audience for Corona SDK on Windows 8 Phone?

#11

And we agree.  But as our Windows 8 phone solution exists now you have access to real native widgets (If I understand correctly).  With limited engineering resources, we have to focus on things that the product needs first, like getting the frame rate up, getting audio working, custom fonts, making sure native and Lua can talk to each other, etc.   If you didn’t have access to the native widgets, I’m sure porting them would be higher on the list of things to do.

#12

Oooh… access to native widgets ha? That changes the whole deal of course. This sounds great!!! 

Of course, it would mean our write once & deploy on all platforms deal would not be true anymore. Perhaps somewhere down the road the widgets could be extended to identify the platform as W8P and call the native equivalents behind the scene so we don’t need to change our code to run on W8P. Just an idea. 

#13

Are the widgets written in 100% Lua code? If yes, what would stop this code from running on any version of CoronaSDK?

I understand that you wouldn’t have a Windows theme, unless that was added.

#14

Widgets are 100% LUA so in theory they should work on W8P. Having said that let’s not forget that in Corona SDK everything runs on OpenGL and that W8P does not do OpenGL… So CL must be doing something different to support W8P and this may mean that not everything may be the same across platforms on Day 1 when W8P support becomes available. At least that’s my speculative read of the tea leaves. Very likely to be completely wrong.

#15

As I said above, we can only do so much so fast.  Some things have to be prioritized over others.  Yes Widget’s are 100% Lua, but we are still porting all the APIs and they probably will run at some point.  I’m not privy to that schedule.  I do know we would have to create theme files and there may be behavioral things like how switches work that would need to be coded to try and mimic the native widgets. 

Rob