Chapter 5. Making a Jigsaw Puzzle Application

Picture this…

So far we've been dealing with a lot of text, or calling on mobile OS features. Those are neat things, but they're not that visual. If you were longing to mess around with pictures and image data, your time has come!

LiveCode isn't naturally a graphics powerhouse, and its way of handling image data (often referred to as "bitmap data" by other tools) is somewhat unusual, in that it effectively stores the pixels of an image as a series of single byte characters to represent the red, green, and blue values of each pixel. Handling of a final image is quite flexible, but in order to create something along the lines of a jigsaw puzzle we need to understand the image data format.

In this chapter we will cover the following:

• Examine the way that LiveCode stores bitmap data in an image object

• Find a way to use a single bitmap in place of 50 buttons

• Make a collision detection map

• Create a jigsaw puzzle app that takes advantage of several mobile...