Get Corona Geek on iTunes, Stitcher, and Chrome

18 November 2012

Get Corona Geek on iTunes, Stitcher, and Chrome

Well, I haven’t made much development progress on my new Minecraft app for iOS, but I do have some exciting news to report for the Corona Geek community.

New iTunes Podcast
This past week I converted the Corona Geek On Air YouTube videos into an audio podcast that could be submitted to iTunes. Apple has since approved the podcast, so I’m happy to report that you can now subscribe to the Corona Geek podcast via iTunes. Each show has been published in it’s entirety, so if you like to listen to podcasts in the gym, while you work, or during your daily commute, be sure to look for Corona Geek in the iTunes Store. While you’re there, be sure to rate the podcast and leave feedback.

Listen on Stitcher
That would be pretty cool by itself, but I recognize that not everyone likes to subscribe to podcasts through iTunes, so I submitted Corona Geek to be a Stitcher Partner. I’m a big fan of the Stitcher app, which let’s you listen to podcasts on your iOS or Android device without downloading and managing files. All podcasts are streamed to your device, or you can use the offline feature of the app to listen to shows without an internet connection. Everything is handled automatically. I use Stitcher to listen to the Wall Street Journal Tech Report, Build & Analyze, Android Authority, MacCast, and CNBC’s MAD Money. Now you can listen to Corona Geek on Stitcher along with all your other favorite shows. Again, if you feel like being awesome, be sure to rate and comment to help the show out there as well. Any social sharing you want to do would also be appreciated.

Chrome Extension
And lastly, if you’re a Chrome browser user, I’ve created a Corona SDK API Quick Reference Chrome Extension that gives you quick access to the Corona SDK documentation. This is the first version of the extension, so I’ve elected to keep things extremely simple, just so I could get it published without any feature creep. In a future version, I plan to add an advanced search feature that will let you search across multiple Corona SDK resources. You can install the Corona SDK Chrome Extension from the Chrome Store and just like before, ratings, comments, and social sharing would be a big help.

Other Community Highlights

Here are a few other highlights from the week that you might be interested in. As always, the weekly Corona Geek On Air hangout is happening each Monday at 2pm Central. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this update, the videos are now being added to the podcast feed, so you can listen, watch, or join us live anytime you want.

Tap For Tap interview

Last week I talked with Eric Dyck, co-Founder of Tap For Tap about the Corona SDK and Eric let me know that Tap For Tap is working on integration with Corona. If you haven’t heard of Tap For Tap, be sure to check out their Tap Exchange program for cross promoting apps. We have a full interview scheduled with them on November 26’s show, so look for more details coming soon.

Ninja Pig Studios interview

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jordan Schuetz, Founder of Ninja Pig Studios. Jordan gave a great interview with lot of insights about the Nook marketplace and how the Corona SDK has helped him to take advantage of opportunities better than any other platform could. Watch his interview for full details.

Dallas Corona SDK Meetup on Google+

Last week we hosted an online Dallas Corona SDK Meetup on Google+. The topic was the Storyboard API and a full panel of Corona SDK developers showed up to the discussion. Not everyone was able to attend who wanted to because of time zones, so we’ll be scheduling more of these in future so everyone will have an opportunity to participate.

Next Week’s Corona Geek Shows Guest

On Monday, November 19th, we’ll be joined by special guest J. A. Whye, developer of the Corona Project Manager (CPM). We’re going to ask him about the next version of CPM, and his courses on Beginning Mobile Game Development and Business Apps Using Corona SDK. Be sure to join us at 2pm Central for the live show.

Toff is working hard on his latest app

In-house, Christopher “Toff” Ward is working on his new Corona app for iOS. He’s been working on a snap to grid solution for positioning items on the screen. His app has gone from concept to full working prototype in about a week. Some of that time was spent refactoring the code as he’s learned how to use different features of Corona. One good example of what I mean is, he totally gutted his code in favor of making auto save possible for each change in his app. Totally redoing the code to account for this feature took less than a day and the user experience was improved 100 fold. That’s the power of Corona.

My app is coming along we’ll

My app on the other hand isn’t progressing as fast, but not because of Corona. I’ve been spending most of my time, editing video, converting files to mp3, creating t-shirt giveaway entry forms, submitting podcasts to iTunes, and creating the Chrome Extension. Marketing tasks can eat up a lot of time, which is a topic we plan to cover in the future. As indie developers, we all need to market our apps, but most of us would rather be coding than promoting, so we’ll bring in some experts to talk to us about how we can get the most mileage out of our marketing efforts and how we can be productive indie devs.

That’s it for now. Have a great week ahead.

Charles McKeever
CoronaGeek