Amber Rays "Deal of the Day" Application

Amber Rays "Deal of the Day" mobile application contains store hours, contact information and most importantly users can rub off the virtual scratch ticket each day for a chance at great discounts and possibly even free things in the store!

Who doesn't love lottery scratch cards?  If you're tanning at Amber Rays you gotta have this app!

This application is currently available on the Android marketplace and is pending review in both the Apple App Store and on the Amazon Marketplace!

It is currently supported on Android devices.

****Update Version 2****

Overhauled the interface and created some tanning tips.

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Update Detroit Lions Schedule for 2011

Here is the first revision to my Detroit Lions schedule for the season, now available on both Android and iOS!

Corona UI "Themes"

Tonight I'm working with the new Corona UI and created a "blue" theme of all the controls, here is the coffee sample in fashionable blue that I have created for a my update to the Detroit Lions schedule that will be coming out this weekend.  If you have an interest in other colors let me know and I can help create them for you.   Also note these images are running on the Android emulator using "zoomStretch" in the config.lua file.

 

Setting up iMac for Mobile development with Corona SDK

I have officially made the move to MAC, of course I still use my Windows stuff on a VM utilizing parallels, but this post is about the feat of strength to stand up my mobile development environment on this new foreign machine to me and it ends with a successful deployment to my Android phone...

My main reasons for making is the switch is that I have decided on using Corona SDK for my mobile middleware.  I have done native Android development, but to pick up yet another language to port to iOS is just not very appealing.  With Corona, I can use Lua scripting and write my code once and deploy to both Android and iOS - perfect!

The toolsets I use:

• Eclipse
• Helios edition
• Android SDK
• Java Runtime
• LuaEclipse (Lua 5.1 plugin for Eclipse)
• XCODE - developer tools for mac and needed for iOS development
• Corona SDK

Lets begin...

1.  Install Eclipse    (This step is pretty straight forward, no surprises, just pick the version you want)
2. To get Lua integrated with Eclipse, you have some hoops to jump through, i relied heavily on this post which was quite helpful.  LuaEclipse  The main catch is that you are going to need XCODE installed in order to be able to use macports to grab the Lua interpreter and profiler that you will subsequently setup within Eclipse.  (Keep in mind if you are working with Corona, any text editor will do since their are limited editors with text highlighting and auto completion for te Corona API's, but for my taste I want to continue working within Eclipse as much as possible in case I go native on android I'm good to go.)  Again, trying to use as many common tools and write once approaches as possible to get on both Android and iOS.
3. Pull down the Android SDK - not bad on this step just follow the steps on Android SDK Install Guide

Gotcha's....

• There's a step after installing luarocks from macports where you need to allow luarocks to run as a privileged user - this was foreign to me and later I found to just get to the file in Finder and click the little pad lock and enter my master password, change the permission and lock it back down - not too bad
• This is more of a Corona thing, but when I got my first application published to my phone I couldn't get the correct icon to display in the applications menu, this is because they need to be correctly sized and named beginning with Android 2.2 as such:
• Icon-hdpi.png  72x72 pixels
• Icon-mdpi.png 48x48 pixels
• Icon-ldpi.png 36x36 pixels
• Also, for earlier versions you need an icons folder in your solution and just an icon.png file of 48x48

Well that's it for now, after a couple hours pulling all this together I have a nice workflow environment that I feel at home with to code for both Android and iOS utilizing the Corona SDK for emulating and building and Eclipse for my Lua script editing.