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Browsing the net the other day I stumbled accross this new SDK called Corona, at anscamobile.com. It’s basically a superset of functions and libraries which allows you to (allegedly) speed up your development process for the iPhone. So far, it seems to be an SDK geared towards game developing on the iPhone.
I downloaded the package and installed it without problems. Corona comes with a built in iPhone simulator which allows you to test at least the apps shipped in the tutorial. One of the most interesting things about this library is its language: lua. I know Objective C can be a little strange, but pushing lua as a programming language for the iPhone is quite a bold move. I don’t really know hoe many people know lua, and I also don’t know the size of the lua communities on the web, but compared with other alternatives, I suppose lua has quite a limited set of adopters. I never tried lua before, so there might be some advantages in using it, such a simplicity in deploying and / or maintenance.
It seems that the library is already used by a number of developers, some apps are already on the APP Store (Fishies, the app featured in the Corona Simulator picture below, is one of them).
There a lot of things missing from this SDK, such as how you can test your apps on the iPhone simulator, how you can deploy them using iTunes Connect and so on, but as a phenomenon, I do find this pretty interesting. I didn’t play with it extensively, other than testing the examples, and this is manily because my lua knowledge is pretty limited at the moment, but it does look as an interesting thing.
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I’d argue that Lua can have a better learning curve than Objective C, which can be quite striking at first if you never experienced both C *and* Smalltalk.
What I find weird is their “How much will it cost?” entry in the FAQ. How do they expect anyone to base their business on this framework when they don’t say anything about the conditions and pricing? What if I release my project and shortly after that they come up with some terms & conditions that are unacceptable?
On the other hand I’m sure that a lot of work went in this framework. Since interpreted languages are not allowed on the iPhone, it means they have to compile the Lua code into native code – they can’t just run it on Lua’s virtual machine. Pretty cool!
Yeap, the pricing is even fuzzier than deployment at this point, which is too bad, because the animation routines seems pretty mature and stable. Other than that, a thing to keep my eyes on, that’s for sure
From what I’ve been told, the pricing structure is still being determined. They have several options in terms of how to get app to you, but you have to remember this is a pre-beta, so a lot of things aren’t there yet. They have a good forum thats pretty actively updated that you should keep your eye on for answers to questions like this one.
Pricing seems pretty straight-forward now — one year for $100 OR a free 30-day http://anscamobile.com/corona/
I noticed them after they got some excellent press last month. (http://bit.ly/6meNdP) This may even be better for iPhone apps than whatever Flash concoction that Adobe eventually ends up spitting out!