Saturday, October 10, 2015

Landscape Version 1.4



Hey kids! It's that time of the year again, when I realize I've been hoarding changes to Landscape and I could probably share the love.

So I just posted version 1.4 of Landscape. It's a simple way to create responsive webpages, currently (see below) OSX only.

You can get the free demo here:
http://conjurebunny.com/landscape/

You can also buy a license here.

Cool stuff in version 1.4:
* Added new Facebook Comments feature: http://landscapeftw.blogspot.com/2015/10/landscape-facebook-comments-system.html

* Increased WC3 compliance. With the exception of third party html, Landscape's main html and CSS should be fully WC3 compliant now. No, seriously. I'm not kidding. Check it out yourself, by clicking here. I know no one cares about WC3 compliance anymore, but that's how Landscape rolls.

* Addressed some CSS concerns. There are still some CSS issues, but most stem from vendor names, and I'm looking into what can be done there.

* Increased awareness of other pages in the same site - linking now detects other landscape pages and lists them in a popup menu. All you have to do is have the other landscape documents in the same folder, and it should figure it out.

* I removed the incorrect alt tags for images, and changed those to title tags in the html. Why? Because the technique I'm using to make images load super fast on mobile devices doesn't lend itself to using an alt tag. This should suffice though.

* Fixed an issue where page background colors were slightly wrong. This also fixes one of the WC3 compliance bugs as well, where a page could have an RGB value of 256,256,256.

About that Windows version:
The Windows version is being written from the ground up in LiveCode. Changes in LiveCode 8 kinda broke things, so I'm going back to version 7 until they fix them. I filed bug reports. I trust it won't take long.

But in general, for the Windows version I'm changing the way a lot of the app is designed, so it's easier to add things to it in the future. The Facebook Comments plugin mentioned above is actually the first "plugin" compatible with both the Windows version and the OSX version. As soon as the Windows version is something resembling a beta, I'll let everyone know.

Oh, and if you want to try it when it's ready, please send me your email address here, and I'll add you to the list!
http://conjurebunny.com/windows.html

Thank you,
-Chilton

Landscape Facebook Comments system



In Landscape 1.4, we added the Facebook Comments system. Here are some notes on how to use that:

This will let you cleanly and easily add a Facebook comment engine to your Landscape based web pages, without having to run any server side software at all. Facebook handles all of that for you, if you set it up right. And Landscape will set most of it up for you. It's pretty spiffy.

To use this feature, you'll have to first create a "Facebook app". Don't worry, it's not as hard as it sounds. To do that, you'll need to be registered as a Facebook developer. So go here and do that:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/register

Then go here and create a new app. You can choose a WWW app if you just plan on moderating some pages. Otherwise, if you have bigger plans for your app, choose whatever you think is appropriate. The reason you're doing this is so Facebook will know who can moderate your pages. If you create an app, anyone you add to that app as a developer will be allowed to moderate pages you use that app ID for.

https://developers.facebook.com/apps/

Once you have that app created, just copy that App ID.

Now, go build your page in Landscape. Click the Objects->Facebook Comments button to add a comments area to your page. It will be red until you set it up properly.

Double-click it to set it up.

In the inspector window, two fields must be set, AppId and URL.

You copied the AppId just a moment ago, so paste it in here. Just the number. We don't need anything else.

And for the URL, if you don't know this yet, um... put something in as placeholder so you can test it.

This is all part of how Facebook tracks what pages have what comments. So when you go to deploy this, I assume you'll know the url back to this page, and enter it here.

It's important that this link is correct, because other people will see replies as "Someone just replied to your comment" or something like that. If you click that link, it will go to the url you entered here. So if it's wrong, they can still post comments, but you will go to the wrong page when you try to view them by clicking on a link in Facebook.

So get the url right.

One last thing--Facebook comments don't resize properly, and there's very little I can do about that at the moment. If the user reloads a page after they've resized it, it will fit.

That's about it. Deploy to a live web server and you should be good! Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Thanks!
-Chilton