Comments on: One Game A Month – April Postmortem: Health Katas

By: Ted

Ted — Sun, 26 May 2013 20:39:59 +0000

For the science side I hear you – lots of ifs/buts/maybe to be found in even the most basic statement – largely I guess because scientists are a cautious breed and it is not in their toolset to offer opinions even on a 90% cert. Maybe rather than look at studies check the big orgs publicity material – maybe there is some leaflet from the American Heart Assoc that says apples and fish are good etc. Which may not satisfy your hunger to understand it all but would prob be adequate refs for a mobile app. FWIW from my reading/understanding on nutrition and lifestyle one thing I concluded is that it is just as important to cf your own family as it is to do anything else – you share a lot of genes with them and they will often have developed habits that make their lives better, maybe not from science study but from trial/error and experience which can sometimes be more useful.

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:24:41 +0000

As someone who likes to build UI components, I wish I could clone myself and work on all of these platforms.

By: Richard Leggett

Richard Leggett — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:40:53 +0000

In reply to JesterXL. Ah I see, so this is more the "bucket types" (e.g. small or large screens). I'm just tweaking some layouts for my "sw480dp" bucket right now, that's screens with at least a smallest width of 480 device independent pixels, there's a lot of work involved to get apps looking crisp. Sounds like display.pixelWidth combined with actualContentWidth may get some way there in this case. Enjoyed the post anyway.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:42:16 +0000

In reply to Richard Leggett.

Hah, Richard, sup dude, long time! Naw, this goes way beyond just density to pixels per inch, I mean an actual real responsive design where you can get a completely different navigation bar designed for larger screens/resolutions. I completely spaced on not only that for tablets, but also on just the basics of a good “setSize(desiredWidth, desiredHeight)” function. Little things that just kill end results/deadlines and user experience.

Regarding density, I think you could do what you’re suggesting via combining display.pixelWidth and pixelHeight… will have to try tonight, good idea!

By: Richard Leggett

Richard Leggett — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:14:26 +0000

You got me thinking about the 60px height toolbar. On Android I wrote a Util class with a method dpToPx(dpValue) which takes a value in device independent pixels (akin to CSS px) and multiplies by device density. In Corona can you grab the device’s density (e.g. iPhone 4+ is 2, Nexus One was 1.5, new Androids are also ~2). This way you can either set the height to Util.dpToPx(60), or build that support into the component. The idea is it renders the same physical size on all devices making it thumb-friendly. If you can’t grab density of course this is moot!