New Site and Improved Communication

By now most of you have heard about our new name, our celebration sweepstakes and may have had a chance to explore our new website. Those of you that haven’t, please check it out – we think you’ll find it to be a valuable resource. We’re also excited because there are a lot of under-the-covers benefits for us and we’ll be able to add/edit content more quickly and effectively. Having said this, there are always small issues and we’ve been working hard to resolve those. We’ve already gotten a lot of energetic feedback and we’re looking forward to getting more. Please keep it coming.

More importantly, the new site is just the first step towards our goal of increasing and improving communication with our community. With this goal in mind, we’ll be working on a bunch of new initiatives in the next few weeks/months. I wanted to give you all a quick taste of just a few of these:

1) Bugs and Roadmap – As Walter wrote a few weeks ago, we are going to be more transparent about what bugs are outstanding and what we are working on. Our site, under Resources, now has sections for both of these items. Look for them to be fully functional soon.

2) Corona Certified Developer Program – There is great demand for qualified Corona developers, and developers want a way to show they know the platform well and are available for different work opportunities. The program will address this and we’ll be rolling out more info on this soon. In the meantime, please send an email to certified@coronalabs.com if you are interested.

3) Improved forum – This is something we hear often and with good reason: we need to improve our forum. We hear you and are working on it. As soon as we finish up with the new site, improving the forum is going to be one of our top priorities.

4) Improved documentation – Our new documentation is now up and Jon posted a great guide to it recently. We think you’ll find it easier to navigate and find what you need. The great thing is that it has other built-in benefits: the feedback mechanism will let us keep it fresh and the way it has been structured lets us make improvements on a daily basis.

5) Developer Lunches – This one is going to be very fun. We’ll announce it in the next week or so, but it’s about bringing developers into Corona Labs to give us very direct feedback on the platform and, in turn, get feedback on their apps and games.

6) Education Center – Finally (for now), we have a great new Developer Education Center coming soon to our Resources section. There are hundreds of Corona tutorials and other resources out on the Internet and we want to make it easy for our developers to find and take advantage of them. We’re also going to involve great developers from our community in interesting ways.

Our goal is to be the absolute best platform for building rich mobile experiences and our community is a big part of this vision. We’re going to be working hard over the next few months to take Corona to the next level, both technically and operationally, and making sure we communicate in all the right ways with our developers is a key part of this.

As always, please feel free to send Walter or me an email with any questions, comments or ideas. Our emails are our first names @coronalabs.com.

David