LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide: With this book and your basic programming knowledge, you'll find it easy to use LiveCode to create mobile apps for Android and iOS. A great starting point for taking the app store by storm.

It could be that you only have an interest in iOS or only in Android. You should be able to easily see where to skip ahead to, unless you're intrigued about how the other half lives! If, like me, you're a capitalist, then you should be interested in both OSes.

Far fewer steps are needed to get the Android SDK than to get the iOS developer tools, because of having to sign up as a developer with Apple, but the configuration for Android is more involved. We'll go through all the steps for Android and then the ones for iOS. If you're an iOS-only kind of person, skip the next few pages, picking up again at the Becoming an iOS Developer section.

It is possible to develop Android OS apps without having to sign up for anything, but we'll try to be optimistic and assume that within the next 12 months, you will find time to make an awesome app that will make you rich! To that end, we'll go over what is involved in signing up to publish your apps in both the Android Market and the Amazon Appstore.

Android Market

A good starting location would be http://developer.android.com/.

You will be back here shortly to download the Android SDK, but for now, click on the Learn More link in the Publish area. There will be a sign-in screen; sign in using your usual Google details.

Tip

Which e-mail address to use?

Some Google services are easier to sign up for, if you have a Gmail account. Creating a Google+ account, or signing up for some of their Cloud services, requires a Gmail address (or so it seemed to me at the time!). If you have previously set up Google Checkout as part of your account, some of the steps in signing...

Creating iOS LiveCode applications requires that LiveCode must have access to the iOS SDK. This is installed as a part of the Xcode developer tools, and that is a Mac-only program. Also, when you do upload an app to the iOS App Store, the application that is used is also Mac-only, and is also part of the Xcode installation. If you are a Windows-based developer and wish to develop and publish for iOS, then you will need either a virtual machine that can run Mac OS, or an actual Mac.

The biggest difference between becoming an Android developer and an iOS developer is that you have to sign up with Apple for their developer program, even if you never produce an app for the iOS App Store. If things go well, and you end up making an app for the various stores, then this isn't such a big deal. It will have cost you $25 to be able to submit to the Android Market, $99 a year (with the first year free) to submit to the Amazon Appstore, and $99 a year (including the first year...

Once you receive the confirmation of being an iOS developer, you will be able to log into the iOS Dev Center, at https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action.

This same page is used by iOS developers who are not using LiveCode, and is full of support documents to help someone create native applications using Xcode and Objective-C. We don't need most of that, but we do need to download Xcode.

In the downloads area of the iOS Dev Center page, you will see different Xcode versions for Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and for Mac OS 10.7 (Lion), as well as the link to the older Xcode 3. You can also get code from the Mac App Store, and as of version 4.3 of Xcode, that takes the form of an application instead of a developer folder.

Installing Xcode from the Mac App Store is very straightforward; it's just like buying any other app from the store, except that it's free! It does require that you are using Mac OS 10.7.3 or later. If you are using an older system, then you would...

Now that the required SDKs are installed, and LiveCode knows where they are, we can make a stack and test it in a simulator or on a physical device. We do, however, have to get the simulators and physical devices warmed up…

You will have to do a little digging deep into the Android SDK folders to find the Android Virtual Device setup program, and you might well want to make a shortcut or alias to it for quicker access.

It only takes one line of text to add the Kindle Fire to the list of devices that ADB knows about. The harder part is tracking down the text file to edit, and getting ADB to restart after making the changes. Things are more involved with Windows than Mac, because you also have to configure the USB driver, so the two systems are shown here as separate processes:

For Windows:

The first steps are much like those for Android apps, but then it gets quicker. Remember, this only applies to Mac OS,and you can only do these things on Windows if you are using Mac OS in a virtual machine, and doing that is most likely not covered by the Mac OS user agreement! In other words, it's best to get a Mac if you intend to develop for iOS.

By this point, you should be able to create a new Mainstack, save it, select either iOS or Android in the Standalone Settings dialog box, and be able to see simulators or virtual devices in the Development/Test menu item. In the case of an Android app, you will also see your device listed, if it is connected via USB at the time.

Feel free to make things that are more elaborate than asked for in these steps! The instructions will be making the assumption that you know how to find things for yourself in the object inspector palette.

Get your USB cables ready, and connect the devices to your computer. Android first…

Now iOS…

The SDK providers, Google and Apple, have extensive pages of information on setting up their development environments, creating certificates and provisioning files, and so on. The information does have to cover a lot of topics that don't apply to LiveCode, so try not to get lost! These would be good starting pages:

Signing up for programs, file downloading, command-lining your way all over the place, and patiently waiting for the Android emulator to launch, means that it could take the best part of a day to work through what we've covered in this chapter! Fortunately, you only have to go through it once.

We did work through the tasks that you have to do before you can create a mobile app in LiveCode:

We also covered some topics that will be useful once you are ready to upload a finished app:

There will be more mundane things to cover near the end of the book, but not for a while! Next up, we will start to play with some of the special abilities of mobile devices.