17 January 2014
From the Forum — Issue #3
Welcome to the third installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson will highlight outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.
Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!
1. You Use Notepad? That’s so 2009!
Setting up programs, partitioning resources, and building apps can be a confusing enterprise. Ensuring that you have all folders set up correctly, and all image/sound files in the correct directories every time you create a new project, is time consuming and mind-numbing work to even the most organized among us!
There are several third-party solutions available to Corona developers in the world of IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). In addition, Corona Labs itself has recently presented a quality solution as well: Corona Editor! It’s a full-featured IDE that sits atop Sublime Text, considered by many as the “gold standard” of development text editing applications.
Click over to the link below to learn more about Corona Editor and how it can help you get a handle on your project maintenance!
2. You’re People Who Know People!
You made a killer app and everybody you know loves it! But — and this is a “but” with a capital “B” — nobody is talking about it on Facebook. As far as many developers are concerned, this is a tremendous issue and it spells death for any momentum their app has generated.
So how do we get people to use it and talk about it within the Facebook ecosystem? Grassroots efforts of promotion and marketing should never be ignored. However, there’s a very interesting feature within the facebook.request() API that allows us to identify who has our app installed within a list of returned Facebook friends.
Head over to the original thread to see more on this topic and learn how you can make sure Facebook is integral to your app!
3. Doesn’t “Open Source” Mean it’s Broken?
Corona widgets are typically very useful. They help us implement new functionality that would normally take significant amounts of code. Unfortunately, like Abe Lincoln always said, “you can’t please all the people all of the time.” There are some gears in the widget mechanism that may not work perfectly in every instance, and certain functionality may not be present that some users find “absolutely crucial” to the library’s success.
The engineers at Corona Labs, being the intelligent and savvy individuals that they are, have decided to make the widget library open source, from which we can deduce a two-fold reasoning:
- They realize that some features can’t realistically be completed with the staff they have.
- They know that the Corona user base is so strong and motivated, developers would be those most likely to bring the specific features they want to the widget library. In doing this, they have shown confidence that we can start tinkering with things under the hood and have given us some pretty serious tools to allow us to make the next killer app.
So, click on over to the thread where some of the most experienced coders are conjuring magic out of thin air with the open source widget library!
About Alex
Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Software, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancsoftware.
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