Smartface first impressions

I had downloaded Smartface a couple of months ago, and looked at it very briefly. It looked good. Now I am intending to play with it in more depth.

Firstly, I wanted to see what I could do without reading any introductions, no "getting started" guides, just plunge in and create an app.

Well, it is good news, I was able to create a simple Android app very easily, intuitively, and test it on an Android phone.

I started a new project, which created a screen with background image and toolbar at top with two buttons and a label. I was easily able to add my own button and a label, then created an action to change the text of the label when touch the button.

This is the handler script:

/**

* @param {TouchEventArgument} e Returns e.x and e.y values of touched points.

* @this Page1.TextButton1

*/

function Page1_TextButton1_OnTouch(e){

    Pages.Page1.Label1.text = "I touched button";

}

<

...this is where I thought it was odd. There is auto-completion, which incidentally is very nice after suffering the slowness of Appmethod, and it was happy with just "Page1.Label1.text", Page1 being the current screen. However, the label text did not change when clicked button in the phone. It needed the "Pages." in front.

Smartface automatically recognised my Xperia when connected by USB, but at one stage failed to and I had to replug it.

The theme. I hate it, dark grey with slightly-less-grey-text, very low contrast, but there is no choice.

Cannot be run offline. Requires login at startup. I really do not like that. There are situations where I might not have Internet access.

At one stage it brought up Internet Explorer, a link to Smartface In Action app at iTunes (which is required to be installed on an iPhone, for Smartface to have on-device emulation). Yet, my default browser is set to SeaMonkey. I do not like IE, the version in my Windows 7 renders some web pages awful. Smartface should bring up the default browser.

I "published", that is, created an APK file, and my simple app is just under 11MB. Hopefully it won't grow much as the app gains more features.

So, some impressions after about one hour of usage. Probably now I should read the getting started guides and videos.

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Comments

So annoying!

SF has links to online videos, I click one and it launches IE.

SF does not have any "Setup" or "Preferences" entry in menu.

I don't even know what version of IE I have, as IE these days has a dumbed-down interface and that isn't even an "About" box.

So, I will launch SeaMonkey and go to the Smartface website:
http://smartface.io

For the record, I have Smartface version 4.4.0.2, and I let it install all needed dependencies:

.NET Framework v4.5.1
iTunes
JDK v1.7, update 71
Android SDK (and I installed the basic stuff, and API-15)
Node.js

Tags: general