Images

This week was an incredibly important one for my project, images. Because I'm doing a children's ebook, illustrations and images play an important role in what I'm doing.  I realized as I worked that I haven't even scratched the surface of images and will need to do a lot more to get to where I need to be.  For effort and grading this week I'd give myself a solid 85% tops, I wasn't able to get to the coding and learning until late in the week but when I was able to hit it I hit it hard.  I think one of the frustrating things about coding is I can feel like I've worked super hard and see only a few lines of code, but those few lines represent a lot and accomplish what needed to happen.


With this code I had to trouble soot how to first even get the newImageRect to show, which for some reason took entirely too long.  I'm finding more and more that when something isn't working it's because of something small, in this case not putting "" in.  I then tried to learn about masking and that took a good chunk of time, but I finally got it.  Below is the code and result.

Another thing with images was adding effects to them like contrast, saturation, tiles, ect.  I found a picture, put it in and started adding effects to it.  I decided to end with another mask to make sure I was still understanding how to do it.  See the cause and effect below.

App Blue Print

Purpose:

The idea for the app is to make a super simple children's book app designed for preschool-age kids.  The purpose is to give the kids a very basic foundation of the nine languages (including English) offered in the app.  The kids will be exposed to how to say some simple words like "help," "hands," "hello," and so forth. With each page the kids have access to every language.

Approach:

To create the app I'll be using Corona SDK and Adobe Illustrator to create the graphics.  The app will be interactive in the sense that to progress within the story the user has to do a tap motion.  It is also interactive with the possibility of choosing different languages at anytime during the duration of the story.

Flow/Function:

The below slides show what I hope the app will look like and how the user will interact with it.

 Home Slide

"help me" slide-with explanation of how the app will work

Look of actual slide

I can do this layout in place of the one above.  Tell me what you think.

The Second Week

This is all slowly starting to make sense.  This weeks goal was to understand shapes and how they interact/act in corona.  I was able to draw some basic shapes but I wasn't able to do polygons using display.newPolygon( ), I don't quite get the concept there.  Another goal of the week was to start using groups which I understand can be very useful in Corona SDK.  If I understand them correctly the groups act a lot like layers in Photoshop or Illustrator but I wasn't able to get them to work.  In the code below I was able to do some super simple animation to shapes and I'm starting to understand display objects a little better, but there's so much more to do.
If I had to give myself a grade I'd give me a 8/10 because I can't do the things that need to be done but I did make some significant breakthroughs.  After deleting a lot of the code that didn't work over the week I realized that I needed to comment it out so I could get feedback so I apologize for the lack of code and mistakes shown.  I'll do better next week.

coso = display.newRect( 300, 500, 300, 300 )
coso:  rotate( 30 )
coso:  setFillColor( .33, 1, .98, .7 )

coso2 = display.newRect( 900, 500, 150, 150 )
coso2:  rotate( 30 )
coso2:  setFillColor( .90, 1, .2, .9 )

transition.to( coso, {time=2000, x=20, y=600, alpha= 0, width=0, height=0, rotation=900} )
transition.to( coso2, {time=2000, x=20, y=600, alpha= 0, width=0, height=0, rotation=900} )
--I tried grouping coso and coso2 together to do the same thing and I couldn't get it to work.

title = display.newText( "This is my Shape", 500, 100, "Garamond", 70 )
title: setTextColor( .33, .66, 1 )
title.alpha = .6

--local group1 = display.newGroup(coso, coso2 )
local coso = display.newGroup()
local coso2 = display.newGroup()

--poli = display.newPolygon( 100, 34, 134, 222 )

My first Corona SDX experience (week one)

I've learned a valuable lesson the past few days...I don't do well with online learning.  I think I've watched the videos and read the articles 5 or 6 times trying to understand LUA.  The goal with this assignment was to be introduced to lua and to create a simple app using corona and lua.  I understand parts of this but for the most part I need to sit down with someone and really look at it and talk through it.  Mostly what's here is what was presented by the lesson, though I tried a bunch of other combos but they never worked.  Peter, I'd love to sit down and get some more one-on-one on this so I can really understand the basics.  But here's what I was able to do after a couple of hours of trying to understand this all.

print( "I have no idea what's going on" )
local myTextObeject = display.newText( "I have no idea what's going on", 200, 100, "Garamond", 30 )


-- function screentap()
-- local r=math.random( 0, 100)
-- local g=math.random( 0, 100)
--     local b=math.random(0, 100)
-- myTextObeject:setFillColor(r/100, g/100, b/100)
-- end
-- display.currentStage: addEventListener( "tap", screentap )

local firstName = "Michael"
local lastName = "Boren"
local fullName = firstName .. " " .. lastName
print (fullName)

local yearBorn = "1987"
local yearToday = "2014"
local age = yearToday - yearBorn
print ( fullName  .. "is" .. age .. "years old in 2014" )

local function makeFullName( firstName, lastName )
local name = firstName .." ".. lastName
return name
end

local firstName = "Michael"
local lastName = "Boren"
local fullName = makeFullName( firstName, lastName)