Daily Build Roundup: Amazon IAP + Map improvements + New Analytics Dashboard

03 October 2013

Daily Build Roundup: Amazon IAP + Map improvements + New Analytics Dashboard

walter
Amazon Kindle, Android, Corona SDK, Daily Build, iPhone

This week, I have a lot more daily build goodies to share for your mobile app development pleasure. The following are available as of Daily Build 2013.1225.

Amazon IAP

First off, Amazon in-app purchases! Our friends at Amazon have created a plugin just for Corona SDK developers. You’ll be able to sell digital content and subscriptions like in-game currency, expansion packs, upgrades, magazine issues, etc for apps you publish to the Amazon App Store.

For SDK users, your ‘build.settings’ should look something like:

settings =
{
    plugins =
    {
        -- key is the name passed to Lua's 'require()'
        ["plugin.amazon.iap"] =
        {
            -- required
            publisherId = "com.amazon",
        },
    },      
}

settings =

{

plugins =

{

-- key is the name passed to Lua's 'require()'

["plugin.amazon.iap"] =

{

-- required

publisherId = "com.amazon",

}

And for Enterprise users, download the latest Enterprise plugins and copy a couple of JAR files.

Check out the full details in the Amazon IAP plugin docs.

Map Improvements

Next up is maps. We’ve added support to detect when map markers have been tapped. And we’ve also added the ability to set custom images map markers.

These are both accessible via the map:addMarker() API:

local function markerListener(event)
    print( event.type, event.markerId, event.latitude, event.longitude)
end

local options = {
    title = "Displayed Title", 
    subtitle = "subtitle text", 
    listener = markerListener, 
    imageFile = "someImage.png",
}

local myMap = native.newMapView( 20, 20, 300, 220 )
myMap:addMarker( 37.331692, -122.030456, options )

local function markerListener(event)

print( event.type, event.markerId, event.latitude, event.longitude)

end

local options = {

title = "Displayed Title",

subtitle = "subtitle text",

listener = markerListener,

imageFile = "someImage.png",

}

local myMap = native.newMapView( 20, 20, 300, 220 )

myMap:addMarker( 37.331692, -122.030456, options )

You can also remove map markers via a new map:removeMarker() API.

New Analytics Dashboard

Corona-Analytics-Dashboard

LaunchPad analytics are now back online!

You can get stats by going to your dashboard. When you’re logged in, you’ll see a “Dashboard” link on the top.

On the dashboard, we’ve organized all your apps in tabs. You can click on the little ‘x’ to hide the apps that you don’t care about. They’ll be placed in a “Hidden Tabs” section of your dashboard if you want to bring them back.

The great thing about this dashboard is it gives you a lot more useful information than the old analytics dashboard.

Right now, there’s about a 24-48 hour delay, but our friends at Amplitude are working round the clock to bring that down. Part of the reason there’s such a long delay is because Amplitude’s servers are overwhelmed by the number of consumers using your apps!

We expect that delay to steadily decrease as Amplitude tunes their system in coming weeks.

Regressions

Finally, there were several regression issues that we addressed. I’ll just highlight two:

One annoying one was in the Transition 2.0 library. There were several issues that got resolved, such as being more forgiving about ‘nil’ target objects. We also resolved a race condition when new transitions were created or cancelled from inside a completion listener. This latter issue could occur, for example, if you changed storyboard scenes from inside a completion listener.

The other issue was with multiline text in iOS 7. The issue occurred in which the last line of multiline text didn’t show. It’s now fixed.

* * *

That’s it for now. We’ve got a few more announcements coming. One of them is about Graphics 2.0, so if you’re a subscriber, stay tuned!

walter

13 Comments

Damir
Posted at 07:04h, 03 October

Nice additions.

Are Amazon ads anywhere on your roadmap?
Matt
Posted at 07:19h, 03 October

I’m very happy for the map additions. Quick question: Is it possible to add other parameters to the option table for markers and use them or will that break the code?
- dchan
  Posted at 10:00h, 03 October
  
  Yes you can put other parameters into the options table. What are you trying to do? Can you give me a sample? Thanks.
  - Matt
    Posted at 12:46h, 03 October
    
    I wanted to give markers an id number.
    - dchan
      Posted at 14:46h, 03 October
      
      The value returned from addMarker is the id of the marker. You can just use that.
dchan
Posted at 10:00h, 03 October

Yes you can put other parameters into the options table. What are you trying to do? Can you give me a sample? Thanks.
Theo Rushin Jr
Posted at 14:06h, 03 October

REMOVE MAP MARKERS!!!! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! You guys just made my year! I will certainly include the Maps update as a part of my topic in the next meeting.

SWEET!
OPUS
Posted at 15:00h, 03 October

My Analytics dont work. For all my Apps it says 404: Not Found. Why is this happening?
- Perry
  Posted at 15:38h, 03 October
  
  We’re aware that some people have an issue if third-party cookies are turned off in their browser. You can try turning them on or use a different browser such as Chrome. We hope to have a resolution for this in due course.
Scott B.
Posted at 15:15h, 03 October

Love it! Thanks Corona Team!
jch_apple
Posted at 09:59h, 14 October

markerId seems to be set by Corona.

Is it possible to replace it with a given value. ?

For instance

local options = {
title = “Displayed Title”,
subtitle = “subtitle text”,
listener = markerListener,
imageFile = “someImage.png”,
markerId=5
}

That way we could easily retrieve in a table data associated with the marker
- dchan
  Posted at 14:41h, 16 October
  
  This is currently not an option. We did not want to have a case where the user has 2 markers with the same id.
Herock
Posted at 11:15h, 20 December

Hi, i am adding the code bt in android device its not showing how can i do that . I am using corona free edition

Daily Build Roundup: Amazon IAP + Map improvements + New Analytics Dashboard