The Corona Labs Blog

State of Corona

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Yesterday was about making our nickname official and about our new web site.

Now it’s time to talk shop. What’s going on in Corona-land?

Next Public Release

First off, the new public release of Corona SDK is just around the corner. The currently daily build 2012.833 is our “Golden Master” candidate for the next public release.

Let us know in this forum if you see any showstopper issues with it. If all goes well, we’ll be making it available to all developers (not just subscribers) early next week.

Feature Cycle and API Docs

Once the public release is out, we’ll be starting our first feature cycle. In addition, we’ll be checking in various improvements that we didn’t get in before we locked down the code base, e.g. tile culling performance improvements additional improvements to tile culling (see thread), missing events for the new sprite API, etc.

For this post, I’m going to focus on one feature in particular: Documentation.

A big goal for the first feature cycle was to make documentation snapshots available on a per-daily-build basis. In anticipation of that, you’ll notice that all the pages of the new Corona Docs API reference use 2012.833 as the revision. We’re now in a position where we can update our documentation in real-time. We’ve added a feedback system that allows us to track improvements where you can click “Love it”, “Like it, but…” or “Hate it”.

Based on the feedback we’ve gotten, we’ve already made over a 100 small tweaks since we launched the new docs yesterday.

And just so you know we’re listening, we had a lot of folks say they liked the old API index page better. One developer was not shy at all about expressing feelings on the matter:

“The new API style is, to be honest, crap. It’s not benefiting the end user at all. The old style was fast and efficient, and since every API reference was on one page one could search every single keyword with Ctrl+F. Having to navigate forth and back to find what one’s looking for (if it’s to be found at all) is just frustrating and a waste of time! Please bring back the single page reference in addition to the new fancy one.”

Many others also expressed the need for an improved API index page, so we fixed it. If you now go to http://docs.coronalabs.com/api, you’ll see an old-style reference with a fresher look. You can see every single API, and there’s also a handy sidebar on the left, for all the top-level categories.

Monetization

We’ve heard from a lot of you asking for more options on ad networks. I have news on that front! We plan to add AdMob soon. I can’t promise delivery dates yet, as we’re still trying to figure out how to squeeze this in. At the very latest, we’ll add it in the 3rd feature cycle (3 months out).

Based on our research, whatever monetization strategy you choose — paid, ads, in-app purchase, etc. — the only way to really make money is to get lots of customers engaging with your app. It’s a tough problem. We’re still working on the best ways to Coronify the distribution and go-to-market process. When we’re ready, we’ll share more details. Stay tuned!

In the mean time, we’re putting together resources to walk you through the best practices on how to think about the lifecycle of your app.

Extensibility

The ability to extend Corona has been a really hot item. Many of you want to be able to access new functionality that we haven’t exposed yet.

I wanted to let you know what we’re doing here, as it’s not obvious from looking at our web site.

Our first step is offering the Enterprise product. Corona Enterprise is based on the same core engine of Corona SDK, so as we add more features to core Corona, both SDK and Enterprise benefit. The big difference is that with Enterprise you’re coding in Objective-C/Java. The gist is you wrap your own native code as a Lua library. Your native code can be some proprietary library or it could call out to OS API’s we haven’t exposed yet. We’re currently in a private beta, but if you’re interested, you can send an inquiry via the contact form on the Corona Enterprise page. Once Enterprise ships, I’ll be able to share more details on how it all works.

We realize that the Enterprise product isn’t suited for everyone for a variety of reasons, whether it’s because you don’t want to learn Objective-C/Java or the costs of paying for support don’t fit your budget. So we’re working on ways to give SDK developers access to almost the same thing — just without the complexity.

We’re going to do this in two ways:

First, we’re working on giving you access to a greater number of 3rd party services. However, if we bundle every service into the core, we risk bloating the core engine. For example, the size of the Corona core doubles when you use OpenFeint. To scale this up, we are working on a plugin system so that 3rd party services can expose their services as Lua libraries that you can use.

Second, we’re investigating how to give you access to OS features on iOS or Android that we haven’t exposed through the Corona API. It’s still too early to share details, but I will say this is not quite the same as Corona Enterprise. You will not have to write Objective-C or Java code!

* * *

Okay, a lot more to talk about, but I’m almost at a 1000 words, so I’ll stop here. In the mean time, happy coding!

Walter

22 Responses to “State of Corona”

  1. Kausik

    Great update. A lot of us are awaiting for exactly the same features you mentioned in the last few paragraphs. Small features like better map integration will help the folks who use Corona to develop non-game apps. Thanks!

    Reply

    • jeff

      Walter: This is probably the best post I have read from any software supplier but myself in the last 5 years. SInce Carlos went, it has kinda felt that outwardly Ansca had become a rather different company. Im sure that is true in many ways, but the communications and proactivity had changed.
      Your reaction to the API criticism was exactly right, well done. Too many organisations just say ‘well we like it, and it cost us a lot of money, so suck it up’.

      Its too soon to know if Enterprise is for me: (probably not if I heed your pricing hints ), but I love the sound of extensibility.
      I know you guys can’t do everything , but I can see a slew of new add-in products arising, and that can only be a good thing. Giddyap!

      Reply

    • Walter

      @Kerem, I was referring to a specific forum thread. Culling is in for normal display objects on 833, but it’s not working well with ImageGroups. That’s the specific improvement that did not make it into 833.

      Reply

  3. Nick G

    Completely agree on the new API style. It’s perhaps the worst web page I have ever visited. Please make it prettier :)

    Reply

    • Nick G

      Oh, I see you fixed the page. It’s not crappy anymore. Much love, now I can ctrl F my stuff again YAY!

      ng

      Reply

  4. Matt

    In the WWDC keynote recently, Apple presented a feature called Guided Access where native app controls can be visually selected in a running app and excluded from any kind of use. This is targeted at learning environments and others but for me the key point was how iOS detects the controls. The problem is that they need to be native. Widgets are great but they don’t fit into that. On top of this there is the fact that android doesn’t do this either. With corona being such a strong tool for the given target audience I’m concerned that native might be an exclusion point and where the mentioned enterprise-like capabilities could help a lot in this respect. All round great news, even if the various mobile worlds are fragmenting.

    Reply

  6. Adrian Tschubarov

    I have had a thought about something that makes some noise in my head. I am a CoronaSDK student, planning to buy Corona License once I am fully confident I can program and deploy flawlessly.

    But I note that many features of the trial are deprecated or enhanced in the paid version, example the spritesheet vs.the imagesheet to have different images without all the heavy weight of the spritesheet.

    I think blocking the publishing feature is enough to make it a trial, and the trial version should feature all the enhancements for learning purposes.

    Other than that, CoronaSDK is a wonderful platform for designers and programmers that come from flash.

    Adrian.

    Reply

  7. DanS

    I don’t understand the rationale of paying more for Enterprise. We desperately need plugins for our game, but the alternative (Moai) is free. I don’t want to pay more for this feature to get parity with a free open source project.

    Reply

  8. Damir

    I am excited about the Enterprise. Hope it will be available to indy developers (read low budget :) ).
    The possibility to use third party SDKs like in native Java opens a while new universe.

    Reply

  11. Kenn W

    This is a great update. The plugins for 3rd parties is awesome; it will severely increase support for Corona all around I believe. I hope you see that through to fruition. :-)

    Reply

  13. Cleison

    I want to know when it will be fixed, It was broken a long ago and we still with no fix for that.

    ID: 14011 : Fix Scrollbar support in Widgets (ScrollView, TableView)

    Reply

  14. sunil

    the new site looks pretty but some key bits are missing. Agree with the new API page comment, its crap compared to the previous verson. Also notable by their absence is searching the forums (bug raised) and track your posts.

    Reply

  15. lee

    I am befuddled by the new site, I cannot find daily builds, I cannot find my account login, I cannot find my forum history…

    Reply

  18. Konstantinos

    Hi there,

    Did admob find its way to the product? What is the status?

    (Its kind of difficult to find relevant ads for greek content in the other networks)

    K

    Reply

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