Starting Your First Kwik 2 Project - Digital Art and Design

Before we can start our first Kwik project, we need to set up the general settings for the plugin. These settings will tell Kwik where to find the Corona SDK Simulator and where to store your project files. At the bottom of the Kwik panel, you will see the

Gears icon which opens the Settings dialog box.

The Settings dialog box has three tabs: General, Export and Registration. We will set up the paths to the simulator and our main project folder in the General tab. The Export tab contains options for how Kwik will export your project and the Registration tab is where you can input your activation key after you have purchased Kwik. This will unlock the trial version limitations.

General Tab

Corona Simulator Location: Use the Browse button to locate the path to the Corona Simulator application.

Applications - CoronaSDK - Corona Simulator.app
Project Folder Location: Use the Browse button to tell Kwik where to store your project files. While you are learning to use Kwik, make a folder on your desktop named LearnKwik. For each of your book app projects, Kwik will create a new folder inside this LearnKwik folder. The name of each project folder will be the same as the name that you give to your project.

Desktop - LearnKwik - Project Folders
For the other settings in the dialog box, we will keep the default settings.

Now we are ready to start a new project.

In the Kwik panel, you will see a Start Here arrow pointing to the New Project icon. Click the icon to open the New Project dialog box.
Our first step is to give our project a name. For our example, we will call this project "Template".
On the second line, we have the Device drop-down list. Our project will be for both the new retina display iPad (The New iPad - iPad 3) and the non-retina iPads (iPad 1 & 2). We will be supplying Kwik with the high resolution images (2048 width x 1536 height in pixels) for our book app. When we choose New iPad from the list, Kwik will know to generate both the high and low resolution images for both types of iPads from the images we supply.

We can also target the retina display devices when choosing the New Universal option. However, since this is our first book, we will concentrate on just building a project for the iPad.
Depending on the layout for your own book, you will want to choose Portrait or Landscape orientation. For our example book app, we will use Landscape.
Click Create to start the new project. You will get a message reminding you to give a unique name to each layer.

You may want to use a naming conversion that uses the page number as part of the layer name. There are a few rules to remember when naming things in Kwik.
- The name should have 15 characters or less
- First character in the name is NOT a number
- Do not use special characters like < >
- Do not use Lua commands as names.
- Layers and functions (buttons, animation, etc) cannot have the same name

By default, Kwik will create an empty project and you will also see some changes to the Kwik panel. The Kwik logo has been replaced with three sections: the Toolset, Project Info and Pages/Components List.

We will take a closer look at the Kwik panel and tools in a future tutorial. But for now, notice that the Project Info section displays the name of our project and the device option that we set in the New Project dialog box. Also, our default page is listed in the Pages/Components section.

When Kwik created our empty project, it gave us one page (named page1) and one layer for that page (named Layer 1) in the Layers panel. You will also notice that it opened a blank Photoshop window and named it page1.psd. The psd image has the default dimensions for the retina display (2048 width x 1536 height in pixels). Of course, this would be reversed if we had chosen the Portrait orientation.

Finally, if we take a look at our LearnKwik folder on our desktop, we will see that we have a new folder named Template inside the LearnKwik folder. This project folder contains the page1.psd page and the Template.kwk Kwik file.

LearnKwik
   Template
      page1.psd
      Template.kwk

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