Android Beginner Questions

[Tate83]

Hi all,

My first app is becoming multi-system able now.. It's an easy thingy, but good to try stuff.
I figured out how to get everything looking nice on both resolutions.

But I'm struggling with some stuff:
1. On Windows and OSX I can edit some text fields easily as they should be. However, on Android they are write-protected. I can focus on them, but cannot write. The MacBook-Keyboard does not generate any input, and the SoftKeyboard does not come up at all. How do I do that?
2. What is the best way to make the App look nice on Android? At the moment it's all black and grey, no design at all. I set the background color on white on Win/OSX, but that does not reflect on Android.
3. My app is basically to read the status of some of my webservers using a curl command and displaying the result. I managed this on OSX (curl native), windows (curl installed). Can I run a script on Android to access native commands?

Thanks a lot
Pascal

[Simon]

Hi Pascal,
1) Make sure that your editable text fields only have visible, opaque and focusable selected in the inspector. You can select other features but some will make the field un-editable.
2) I'd import cut graphics for your buttons (inspector, Icons & Border) if you want to get something that looks like Android. Possibly use an opaque rectangle control for your background.
3) Just use

Code: Select all

put url "http://www.myurl.com" in myVar
answer the results

into a variable to test your server. If the server is working the results will be empty. More testing would have to be done on myVar to see if you got the response you were looking for.

Simon

[jacque]

Your best bet is to use native input fields on Android rather than LiveCode fields. LiveCode fields currently have problems with some custom keyboards (SwiftKey crashes it) and there is no copy/paste support in mobile. Native input fields support all keyboards, and automatically provide clipboard functions, selections, etc.

Follow Simon's advice for the second two items. You will need to "skin" your app for mobile, there is no native appearance yet. And Android doesn't support the shell command so Simon's url example is what you should do.