Chapter 3. Building User Interfaces

So many different screens!

When making utility or game applications for desktop computers you can often get away with having a particular sized window, for which you can make custom graphics that fit exactly. With mobile devices you have to cope with a wide range of screen sizes, and aspect ratios, and also have interface elements that look correct for the operating system on the user's device.

LiveCode is capable of publishing on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and goes some way towards solving the difficulty of making interface elements look right for each platform. The View menu has a Look and Feel menu item where you can choose between Native Theme, Mac OS Classic, Windows 95, and Motif. The same isn't true for mobile operating systems; all controls look like Motif. You still have two choices; you can create graphics that look like they belong in your target OS, or you can call native routines in order to have the system itself present the correct looking controls...