Having recently developed a few mobile apps using Red Foundry’s Fusion Studio I found it rather frustrating at points simply due to the lack of available community documentation and help. The basic documentation is good, and may of the out of the box features are good and quick to use, but when you get stuck on anything after that you’re pretty much on your own to work it out for yourself (at the time of writing this). This is most obvious when using the beta version of the Android side of things. So here are a few tips for things I have noticed:
1. Positioning elements for Android
When positioning elements within the view do not use pixels (px) within the positioning. Although this works fine for iOS it will stop the layout working AT ALL when rendering for Android.
2. Font sizes
By default when choosing font face and size within the designer it will append PT onto the font size (for points). For font sizing, and also the typeface, to work on Android you need to manually remove the PT from the code, so it would just be ArialBold:12, and not ArialBold:12pt.
3. Image widths and heights
Make sure you set the width and height values of images to ensure they render correctly.
4. Padding
As with a few older, well know web browsers, padding is not great. In fact it does not seem to work at all when rendering for Android.
5. Passing variables from one view to another
This did not work at all using the same set up as iOS.
6. Where’s the Tab Bar?
Unlike other cross platform mobile development studios like Titanium Appcellerator the tab bar that renders fine at the bottom of an iOS app is NOT rdndered at the top of an Android app. It places it out of site off the bottom of the screen available to access via your android phone’s menu button. I can’t speak for all Android phones though, this is based on my testing on the Samsung Galaxy SII.