Join The iPhone Network Lounge, hosted by Bamboudesign, Inc for an iPhone networking event and hear Carlos Icaza (that would be me!) from Ansca, Inc., present the latest release of Corona, an amazing alternative iPhone SDK that makes developing iPhone apps a breeze to seasoned developers and accessible to Flash and web developers alike !
When Russell Brown of Adobe approached us about doing a Photoshop 20th Anniversary app, we were immediately excited (if you’ve seen Russell’s show, you know that his excitement is what you might call highly infectious). His proposal was to boil the functionality down to the 1990 “Levels” control panel, which he felt was the original soul of Photoshop. The app would load an image from the user’s iPhone photo library, allow multiple changes with live previews, and then let them save the modified image back to their library. In short, it would combine the nostalgia of seeing old-school Photoshop UI running on today’s iPhone with a genuinely useful photo-manipulating function.
However, we had to ship the Corona 1.1 update in early February, with a lot of high-priority features. This pretty much wiped out everyone, and also left very little time for the Photoshop app. To get it done for the anniversary, we had to rely heavily on existing sample code and techniques. Think of it as a reality check at gunpoint: Corona had to be as “quick and easy” for us as our marketing always claims, or the project would flop…
At this moment, the Ansca Mobile team is stationed at the Photoshop 20th Anniversary event at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where the following commemorative iPhone app, built by Ansca, has just been unveiled onstage by Russell Brown of Adobe:
If you’re not familiar with Russell, you’ll notice him as the 4th name on the original Photoshop 1.0 splash screen above, which we reproduced faithfully in the app. You can also see him demoing the app in this video.
The function of the app is to load any photo from your iPhone library, and then manipulate it using any aspect of the original Photoshop 1.0 “Levels” panel (which lets you adjust white point, black point and gamma, in separate red/green/blue or combined channels) — including the original image histogram feature. You can then save the modified photo back into your iPhone library.
The app was built entirely with our Corona SDK, using UI graphics and font images from the original Macintosh System 6 version of the application (circa 1990), and we had to build it very quickly. After shipping Corona 1.1, we only had a few days for primary coding on the app; fortunately, we had a few aces up our sleeve, including the ability to consult with Thomas Knoll himself to make sure our image algorithms were functioning properly.
The backstory: Russell originally approached us shortly after we launched Corona 1.0, and his idea was that the “Levels” panel was the soul of the original Photoshop — and that it would be really cool to see it replicated on the iPhone. We even used the original pre-1.0 program icon, from when “Photohut” (as Photoshop was originally named) was first presented to Adobe:
We’re very pleased to be invited to play a part in this historic event, and we’ll shortly be posting more on the technical story behind this app! (Update: more info here)
A lot of speculation, opinion, passion and even war mongering surrounds Flash’s conspicuous absence from the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad. So much in fact that Adobe’s CTO felt compelled to defend Flash and discredit HTML5 video warning that “users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.”
Once Upon a Time
Sitting on the sidelines, I can’t help but think back to my time on Flash. Before the iPhone arrived (a.k.a. the pre-smartphone era), several of us here at Ansca worked on mobile Flash. We worked on devices with as little as a megabyte or two of RAM, with computing power comparable to one of the original Power Macs, and with so little space for binaries that every kilobyte counted. By the time I left, we had achieved breakthroughs in rendering and VM performance that no one at Adobe thought possible on such an old code base and on such underpowered devices.
Fast forward to today. The iPhone is more powerful in every conceivable way, yet Flash apps produced for the iPhone run slowly, eat up RAM, and have gigantic footprints (by mobile standards).
So what gives? Shouldn’t Adobe be able to get its act together? Are they lazy? Are they stooping to new lows? Are they irrelevant?
The Untold Story of Flash and the iPhone
The real story is that Adobe’s sole purpose is the Flash-enabled web which is a euphemism for the Flash Platform (with a capital ‘P’). That is why Flash is the way it is today, for by definition, a platform must be one size fits all. It has to be the same across all devices. In the end, this makes Adobe’s job that much harder and also puts its goals at odds with Apple’s.
What makes this story so dramatic is that Apple actually wanted Flash at one point — yes, you read that right, Apple wanted Flash on the iPhone. At least initially, they bought into Adobe’s vision of a Flash-enabled mobile web. Of course, that all seems stranger than fiction now, but remember the world when SJ first demonstrated the iPhone at MacWorld, months before the first iPhone shipped and long before the advent of the App Store. At that time, Apple was promoting the iPhone as a desktop-class web browser in the palm of your hands, which inexorably meant supporting Flash content. Read the rest of this entry »
Corona 1.1 is now shipping and features GPS, Compass, Native Keyboard support, Twitter API, plus more. Purchase your copy for the unbelievable introductory price of $99.00 at http://bit.ly/7Z1bVn. We have also added new sample code, and more content will be up on our site as well.
The iPhone App Review
“I love games that use the accelerometer in unique and interesting ways… Core Damage [a Corona-powered app] is a really fun and addictive game. Well
worth a look!”
InformationWeek “Corona allows for faster development and therefore allows for a reduced development cycle” Marine Leroux, Bamboudesign, Inc.
As I mentioned earlier, we are fully supporting the new Apple iPad and here is a link showing off one of the most popular built with Corona iPhone Apps, Box of Sox, running in the new iPad Simulator, Box Of Sox.
Today, you can start using Corona as is, and your apps will work on the iPad. We will also take advantage of the lead time to add iPad features into Corona and above all, we will continue to keep a small footprint, take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics, and run at 30FPS or better.
Just want to let you all know that we are fully, 100% committed in supporting the new Apple iPad. Apple, again, delivers what could be a new and exciting product and we are feverishly working on updating out Corona SDK to fully support the iPad.
As we get closer to a release for the new Corona SDK with support fo the iPad, we will let you know. All current Corona based apps should work and future apps done on the current SDK should work on the iPad as well.
And our very own Walter Luh, CTO and Co-founder of Ansca, has been quoted on InformationWeek regarding the new Apple iPad.http://bit.ly/bHUXTW.
So the Nexus Ones arrived at the office, and the Android 2.1 desktop now has animated red and blue wallpaper pixels, and in related news I don’t even care enough to finish this joke because I’m waiting for tomorrow at 10AM like everyone else in the industry. I think I may go down to the SF Apple Store to see if collective hopes and dreams can actually levitate a building.
It makes me really happy when I read a review about a game that was developed using Corona and getting a 9 out of a 10 rating. “Core Damage” is such a game and its review at The iPhone App Review is phenomenal.
“Like I said, I love games that use the accelerometer in unique and interesting ways – and maybe I’m a little bit biased toward that end – but Core Damage is a really fun and addictive game. Well worth a look!”
Am happy. Am sure the folks at Comrade Software are happy too. Thank you guys for a great game and for using Corona!
Today, am happy to announce a new addition to the Ansca team. Eric Herrmann, programmer extraordinaire, graphics guru & mobile developer, joins us as Director of Engineering from Adobe Systems. Eric and I first met at Macromedia while working on the first version of Flash Mobile Authoring. He led the Mac efforts for Flash Lite, Mac development for the Flash Mobile Authoring tool and then worked with me and with Walter on FlashLite 3.0.
Eric has a deep understanding of computer graphics, authoring tools, and runtime environments for both desktop and non-pc devices, and a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Eric will be in charge of our 2D graphics engine as well as maintaining a small footprint and increased performance on our rendering engine.
In addition to Eric, I am excited to have Evan Kirchhoff on board. Evan also joined us from Adobe (he worked as a Senior Engineer on the Verizon Flash Lite project called Verizon Dashboard, also known as FlashCast). Previously, Evan was the cofounder of Comrade Software, a San Francisco Flash and mobile development company that deployed mobile content on both Verizon Wireless and Softbank Japan.
With the engineering talent and deep technical knowledge of Walter, Eric and Evan (and more to come!) I strongly believe that we are poised to create the next generation graphics engine for mobile development, and build mobile solutions for everyone who wants to join the mobile revolution!
When 
A lot of 
The Untold Story of Flash and the iPhone
