Pierre Hébert: do you remember one of my old suggestions about launch an app with the ‘clear flag’, I mean to launch it as new instead of open again as from the recent menu.

Well, just launch this from the shortcut:

var i=LL.getEvent().getItem();

var nt= i.getIntent();

i.setIntent(nt.clone().addFlags( Intent().FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK ));

i.launch();

i.setIntent(nt);

Awesome, we have almost full power from Intents :DDD {perhaps it’s too much but what about LL.launchIntent(Intent intent); ?}

Save layout

So, I’m fully back again…and with a new script!

This is something I started time ago, and I have been improving it adding rotation, custom velocity, and more. Now it’s time to publish it, but of course you can suggest improvements.

This script is something visually beautiful, perhaps a bit slow with too much items, but even I am impress with the final result. It saves the position, size, scale and rotation of the items in free mode, and restore them when launched moving them smoothly (more or less).

I’m good at scripting, but no so good at creating layouts. If you are one of the masters that creates awesome layouts I let you create one with this script, that would be awesome.

It is more than just some lines of code, so I wrote a description after the config. If you want to share a layout with the script the only thing I ask you is to leave those comments. You can modify it if you want (and know).

Instructions:

The script will save the data of the items in the tag of the item/container.

How to move the items: just launch the script from the item with the data (click, swipe…) or even from a container (tap, long tap…)

How to save the data: Launch the script from the scripts menu (LL pop-up –> scripts) and choose the velocity (the first time you can simply just executing normally).

Characteristics:

If the item have a different tag it will ask before save.

Items in grid mode won’t be saved, and also won’t be moved even if they were saved while in free mode.

Rotation works from the center of the item (something obvious, but not script-side)

Debug mode to see if an item is stuck in the animation.

When the launcher lost focus, items are automatically moved to the final position and the script finishes.

If you start a different instance of the script while another one is running, the previous one stops automatically.

Problems:

Items with skew can behave wrong.

———————-

The script is in the first comment. Just click it and copy all.

Tell me if you prefer this way.

Challenge

Let’s wake up a bit this community with a challenge open to everyone (no prize sorry). This is a mathematical challenge to make a script, however you can also try if you don’t know scripting, just tell the steps or write the formulas.

This task is something I’ve been thinking for a lot myself, but I couldn’t get the right answer until now. This is the challenge in case you want to try, not very difficult, easy when you find the answer, but really tricky specially if you take the wrong way (and I took a lot of wrong ways 😛 )

As you probably know, you can get geometry data from items: size, scale, (skew), rotation and position.

However the position you get is the one of the top left corner of the minimum box surrounding it.

What if you want to know the center of the object?

(Note: let’s assume skewX=skewY=0 to avoid that strange parameter)

Task: Write a function with:

Input: an item (or their geometry data as said before)

Output: a vector [x,y] with the position of the center of the object.

You can use the Math functions (cos, sin, tan, acos, asin, atan, abs, sqrt, pow, … )

The video shows how it should behave in action. The cross item is the input, the circle is the output.

(About the ending part: all questions will be answered at the end of the month)

Submit your answers here in comments. You won’t win anything sorry, just the fact of solving this tricky challenge 🙂 I’ll publish my own solution when necessary, I expect to do it in one week or less. I want first to see others.

Also, keep in mind that this is really useful, it doesn’t only tell you the center, also the size of the whole item. Perhaps in the future Pierre will be able to implement the getBoundingBox in items, but from now we have this.

If you found this too easy, this is an extra variation (that I personally couldn’t resolve, so I can’t provide the right answer): modify it to work with skew too.