Your Very First Program

Now that you have installed Gideros Studio, it would be fun to see how it works. Let us look at the Hello World example to start with.

The simplest way to display something is on the console and the way to achieve that is using the lua print statement

1. Start Gideros Studio
2. Create a new project, give it a name, e.g HelloWorld
3. After Gideros Studio starts, right click on the Project window and select "Add New File"
4. Name it "main.lua" (all projects should have a main.lua file initially)

We type the following code in the main.lua file

print("Hello World")

Now click on the Player → Start Local Player menu, when the player windows comes up, you will notice the blue Play and the red Stop buttons are enabled. Click on the play button and look in the output window. You will see three lines

main.lua is uploading
Uploading finished.
Hello World

We have successfully created out very first "Hello World" mobile app using Gideros Studio.

Displaying on the Device

You might have noticed that the Hello World text was displayed onto the console not the device or the simulator (Gideros Player). It can be useful to have debugging statements being printed to the console, but on a device it is not very helpful as there are no consoles attached to the device. So let us look at how to display Hello World on the device.

-- HelloWorld.lua test script

-- Create a new text field with the text Hello World! The font
-- parameter is set to nil, so Gideros will use the default font
local myTextField = TextField.new(nil, "Hello World!")

-- Position the text field at the coordinates of 40,100
-- Without this you won't see the text as with the default
-- font it will be placed above the visible canvas area.
myTextField:setPosition(40,100)

-- Add the text field to the stage
stage:addChild(myTextField)