EachScape Studio lets you design apps.
As with anything that you're learning, there are some general concepts you must learn.
View
- A View is like a page on a web site: it's an outline into which data gets poured into. It might have a title bar at the top, some navigation controls along the bottom and a graphic in the middle. Whatever it contains, we call that a View. (Note to iPhone Developers: the term “view” in the iPhone OS SDK has a different meaning and we're aware of that.)
- A View is a collection of Blocks. A Block is a rectangular area of the screen that performs some function: maybe it shows a button, contains a list of headlines or a collection of thumbnail images. Blocks are the basic, well, building block of a View, and a collection of Views makes an app.
- The View is where you place your blocks. There are different Layout blocks which aid the user in placing their elements as they need based on their design. Some people call that the “content area,” as that's usually where the key content is displayed.
- Each app, View and Block can have certain events that trigger things to happen. For example, when you shake the device, you might want to to switch to a particular View. In this example, “shake” is an event and switching to another View is an action to be performed. Events are certain things that occur (like shaking the phone, tapping a button, etc.) and Actions are what the app does in when the Event occurs.
Layer
- A Layer is much like a View, except it does not stand alone: a Layer is always displayed over another View. More than one Layer can be stacked up concurrently. Layers have no events: any events that are processed while a Layer is displayed will be triggered by the Blocks in the layer, the View that is currently displayed or the App itself.
- Static assets like images and sounds, which don't change once the app is created, go into a Media Folder. Every app has a Media Folder in the EachScape Builder. Another way to save your assets inside of your app is by creating a Cloud Collection (accessed via Data Sources) where you upload your assets and then set the data source to be Local to the device.
Data Sources
- Dynamic assets, like data, videos, images, etc. that might be changeable after the app starts or originate in other computers as feeds or databases are accessed via Data Sources in the EachScape Builder. Data Sources can start out as XML or RSS feeds, or tabular data, e.g., a rectangular area that's pasted from a spreadsheet. Data Sources can reside on the target device as a relational database. In some cases, Data Sources are accessed dynamically from their source and never exist on the device in a persistent form: each time you ask for data the app can go back to the source.
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