Web New Media notes and ramblings

Here’s a set of tiles I created with Spritesomething on my iPad on a trip.

Here’s an image created with the tiles. Could be used in a platform game as the background.

Corona provides a system for creating buttons and other interface elements in the “widget” module. Their web site points out that this module is in Beta at this point, and so the commands used here may change and evolve as it is further developed.

The “widget” module includes a tool for creating buttons. You can use this to create basic buttons with a stroke fill and color. It can also be used for buttons created from images.

The first step to use the “widget” module is to include it in your project with:

local widget = require "widget"

Next create a button using widget.newButton{}. Note the {} end that line not the ()! Within the {} you will define properties that describe your button.

For example the following would create a button 160 pixels wide, 40 pixels tall, positioned 80 pixels from the left and 220 pixels from the top, with a 12 pixels corner radius.

local button = widget.newButton{id="b1",
left=80,
top=220,
label="Tap",
width=160,
 height=40,
 cornerRadius=12,
 onEvent=on_button
 }

This button would call the on_button function when it is tapped. You might define this event handler in this way:

local function on_button(event)
 if event.phase == "release" then
 print("Button Released")
 end
end

Remember you’d need to define the handler above button definition. All three pieces together might look like this:

local widget = require "widget"

local function on_button(event)
 if event.phase == "release" then
 print("Button Released")
 end
end 

local button = widget.newButton{id="b1",
 left=80,
 top=220,
 label="Tap",
 width=160,
 height=40,
 cornerRadius=12,
 onEvent=on_button
 }

For a full list of properties consult the Corona documentation here: http://developer.anscamobile.com/reference/index/widgetnewbutton