With Perk.com, Corona Labs enters the next chapter

01 December 2015

With Perk.com, Corona Labs enters the next chapter


News & Announcements

Hi folks, my name is Roj Niyogi and I’m President/Co-founder of Perk.com. Some of you have already had a chance to learn a little bit about both Perk.com and myself from the Corona forums.

As Walter mentioned in his most recent post, Corona is joining Perk.com. Important to know and as indicated by Walter, he and I had been chatting for several months now comparing notes and sharing thoughts around his original vision of Corona and how Perk might be able to help.

As a developer myself, I know that one of the most important things to me when considering a development platform -outside of a platform’s overall feature set and capabilities- was the platforms general viability. I can assure the Corona developer community that with Perk.com’s support as a profitable publicly-traded company, Corona has an extremely bright future ahead.

So what does the next chapter bring? Here’s a small preview:

Support for more plugins
Corona already sports several popular plugins that make up the Plugin Directory today. However, there are many many more that will help continue to “round out” the platform: plugins for services such as Segment.io, Crashlytics, Helpshift and more make up the ever-evolving landscape of mobile utilities that enhance app experiences for users and help developers make better decisions when building their apps. We invite our community to share their plugin requests.

Corona Ads
Corona will soon launch Corona Ads – a simple and elegant way to introduce monetization via display and video ads into your Corona apps. With Perk.com’s deep relationships with ad partners today, we’re excited to extend this to the Corona developer community and make it even easier for developers to earn money from their mobile apps.

Corona Asset Store
A natural extension of the Corona platform is a general marketplace that allows developers like you to take assets (components, graphics, etc) and make them available to other developers to buy and implement into their own apps.

Corona Con, anyone?
Corona developer forums are great and with such a vibrant developer community, it seems about time there should be a Corona SDK oriented conference to really bring the community even closer together. And what better venue than centrally-located Austin, Texas. Beer, BBQ, Tex-mex and good conversation around Corona seem to be the ingredients for a perfect conference recipe and we’re looking forward to bringing you the first conference in late 2016 (Austin City Limits, anyone?)

All in all, I consider any and all Corona developers to be pioneers, thought-leaders, and pragmatists. You use Corona because it just makes sense and feels right; it’s easy to learn, easy to use, and it’s cross-platform. It’s supported both by a passionate engineering/development team and a thriving community of developers.

Some of you might be wondering why Corona changed hands again. The answer is actually fairly simple: to fully support Corona and take it to greater heights. The Fuse acquisition could be seen as a trailer to the movie or the appetizer to the main course; metaphors aside, the fact is that much of what Fuse aimed to accomplish with its acquisition of Corona Labs, Perk.com will deliver on.

Perk ♥ Corona!

Onward we go.

-roj

roj
22 Comments
  • Kiffin Ayers
    Posted at 07:28h, 01 December

    Thank you for those exciting words! I’m excited by the prospects for the coming new year. Congratulations! And, On we go!

  • Tony Godfrey
    Posted at 10:23h, 01 December

    Those sound like some great ways to expand Corona’s reach, and I am glad to see Support for more plugins at the top of the list! Exciting times.

  • jch_APPLE
    Posted at 10:59h, 01 December

    To be honest, it’s difficult for us, basic users, to know how this acquisition will change our lives. When Fuse acquired Corona Labs, I didn’t imagine that the company would sell it one year after.
    But I’m positive. Congratulations to new comers and hope new plugin’s will come soon, especially a better text management for business apps (some kind of text box that could mix fonts, colors and sizes…)
    What about price policy? Will the “next chapter” change anything in Corona pricing? I’ve seen in my “corona life” free, paying, paying more, free again…. It would be nice to have some feedback from new management.
    Thx

  • Adam
    Posted at 11:17h, 01 December

    Hi,

    First things first, congratulations and yes, onwards and upwards. However I’d like to echo ch_APPLE above and I’m wondering what next? I see many of the add-ins/plug-ins are about money in one shape or another. This is not a bad thing, but there are many additional areas such as basic text boxes, etc. as above for business type applications where I think there is a market.

    For the basic users, perhaps a better or intermediate access to some of the lower level API’s without having to go to the Enterprise addition and perhaps keeping a closer track on the iOS/Android versions for their functionality. What happened to the level editor? Still beta? Windows OS?

    I too never expected one year on for Corona to be sold again – for whatever reasons but I think there may be some quiet cynics out there too and having seen this sort of ‘movement’ of companies in the past it can usually spell the end for the consumed company. I certainly hope this isn’t the case with the excellent work that Corona have done.

    Thx.

  • Lerg
    Posted at 11:46h, 01 December

    Nice milestones! Fuse did not use Corona to it’s full potential, however this year was pretty good for developers, we’ve got new platforms, new plugins and so on.
    I only see Corona to rise and extend with Perk.

    From my personal wish list, I’d mention vector images support. Hope this to see in the next year.

    • Martin
      Posted at 15:45h, 10 December

      I second the vector graphics. 🙂

  • Terry
    Posted at 13:21h, 01 December

    I think this is good news. The last year saw quite a lot of progress with the Corona platform that gave developers stability and increased monetization opportunities such as desktop app support. A new “owner” should bring fresh dedication and infusion of capital support that will enable Walter and his team to follow through on these efforts as well as keep Corona in the forefront of 2D app development. I’m going to write Santa and ask for a real debugger for Corona in 2016.

  • jerejigga
    Posted at 13:28h, 01 December

    As a resident of Austin, TX I am absolutely delighted to see that there are plans to have a Corona Con in Austin. I am just a little bummed that it’s scheduled for so long from now. In any case, my team and I will be there! I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Corona SDK.

  • Scott
    Posted at 19:10h, 01 December

    I am glad you are trying to get windows and osx out of beta. But you guys at corona need to get more of your beta stuff out of beta like Corona Viewer, GUI , Facebook v4, and Html5. I would not be juggling to much stuff and be more laser focused.

    • jch_apple
      Posted at 23:21h, 01 December

      +1 :o)

  • grcool
    Posted at 23:20h, 01 December

    I am worried about Fuse AdRally plugin and integration. It will be dropped or not?

    • Rob Miracle
      Posted at 17:25h, 02 December

      We have no intention of dropping the Fuse plugin.

  • Tony
    Posted at 04:38h, 02 December

    Congratulations and Good news, I hope it also good news for us the developers
    Corona is powerful way to build Apps, but few times there are holes in basic&core features that I think need to be covered before cover any new Area
    for example
    How to enable multidex build in Android?
    btw anyone know the answer? will make my week

    In general I think it’s priority to move to gradle build since Google dropped support for ant building

    Cheers,

  • Dave Haynes
    Posted at 08:24h, 02 December

    Fuse just wasn’t a good steward of Corona Labs. Roj has already shown much more enthusiasm than I ever saw from Fuse. I’m excited about this now, and I think his list of things to do matches what most of the Corona community has been asking for.

    But seriously, you do need to fix the plugin system: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/60169-specific-versions-of-corona-store-plugins/

  • Google releases Cloud Vision API, EFF makes complaint about Google tracking student info, patent shows Amazon wants to do something with AR—SD Times news digest: Dec. 3, 2015 - SD Times
    Posted at 10:55h, 03 December

    […] moving to the “next chapter” for Corona, as Perk president and co-founder Roj Niyogi wrote in a blog post. Corona will now support more plug-ins and will soon launch Corona Ads: a way to introduce […]

  • Dev1
    Posted at 11:30h, 04 December

    Congrats to Corona team and Perk. Roj, I hope you will continue to enrich the Corona ecosystem and give it the funding / support it needs. I am amazed at how easy it makes mobile app development and yet how few developers are aware of it, or use it.

    After using other SDKs such as Titanium for years, I was blown away by Corona’s simplicity and elegance. Please keep Corona free for hobbyists and small developers like me, and keep it simple as it is today. Thanks!

  • Simon Fearby
    Posted at 13:29h, 04 December

    I would like to see more work on business app potential for corona.

    I’d pay for plugins like barometer access, AWS or CouchDB cloud plugins to say cloudant.com?

    A IDE for dragging and dropping controls (at least in the early stages of development would be awesome (something a ssimole as the old Visual Basic 3 IDE from the 1990’s) would be awesome.

    Good luck and hope we see some new feature and API’s like.

  • Mileni
    Posted at 15:16h, 04 December

    Greetings,

    I really have no idea what all this means. Sold again? 🙁
    And constantly brining in new ‘betas’… I really wanted to see ‘real’ corona GUI finished (with widgets, as powerful as unity has it’s gui).

    But every time you guys announce something, a few months later you take on another task without finishing the work started before. Kinda hard to go for corona when it’s like that 🙁

    Anyway, best of luck to you.

  • David Grant
    Posted at 17:55h, 05 December

    I’m interested to hear the stance on new advertiser plugins? Are you guys now going to allow 3rd party advertisement plugins or are you going to force everyone to use the perk ads the same way you made everyone use adrally with the last buyout?

    • Dave Haynes
      Posted at 13:36h, 10 December

      @David Grant, They’ve already said they won’t require you to use Perk. Also, I didn’t think they ever required anyone to use AdRally either…

      • David Grant
        Posted at 23:40h, 12 December

        You were never required to use them, but they denied the ability for people to make 3rd party ad plugins. They were trying to limit the number of competitors so that it was pretty much between AdRally or admob. You couldn’t just see an ad company you wanted to test and then build a plugin for it. I really hope perk isn’t the same way.

  • Kerem
    Posted at 18:43h, 23 December

    Good luck! I checked out at Fuse and will check back in at Perk if things look up! Even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day. Can we get this clock ticking again? 🙂