We know we have at least one guitar player using Corona, so we thought this would be some great news to announce.
Heavy metal guitar powerhouse ESP Guitars just released their app, The ESP Experience, for iPhone. The Corona-made app features regularly updated free song downloads, a nationwide ESP dealer locator, and even a video guitar lesson from Gus G. (Ozzy Osbourne’s new guitarist) It also includes a built-in chromatic tuner, perfect for guitarists and bassists who don’t want to carry around a stand-alone tuner with their gear!
ESP’s artist roster includes James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Tom Araya of Slayer, and Max Cavalera of Sepultura/Soulfly — and the Ansca Mobile team is honored to have been chosen to help contribute to that legacy! Also, special thanks to Brainmask, who designed and built the app using Corona.
You can download The ESP Experience over at the App Store right now.
More details on the app can be found on the ESP blog.
Over the weekend,Beebe Games’Doodle Dash! game broke into the App Store’s list of top free apps, coming in at #25! This comes just on the heels of it being OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day honor last Thursday, which brought in over 40,000 downloads for the game.
Creator Jonathan Beebe must now be even more thrilled than he was when we interviewed him last week. We would like to extend our congrats and thanks to him for using Corona to build his successful game!
You can grab Doodle Dash! over at the App Store right now.
Jonathan Beebe recently made a splash withDoodle Dash!for iPhone, his first foray with Corona that just received the honor of being OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day.
Below, Jon details the process of choosing an SDK, creating Doodle Dash! (twice!) and why he hasn’t yet gotten around to buying a book on Objective-C.
To kick things off, can you give a background of your experience in game development? What types of platforms and languages can you work with, and which one(s) are your preferred ones to work with?
I’ve been “experimenting” with game development for a couple of years now. I have been a self-taught PHP web developer since 2006 (my preferred language, that is, until I discovered Lua through the Corona SDK) and I tried my hand at indie game development about a year and a half ago. I managed to get almost all the way through creating a logic/puzzle game for Windows using a piece of software titled “GameMaker.” (which, despite its name, is actually a mature and professional piece of software)
Unfortunately, due to time constraints and my personal situation at the time, I never got quite 100% through with the game. Besides, what I really wanted was a way to put my game creation on my new iPhone that I had just purchased, so there was a little inner conflict there when it came to developing desktop software/games anyway — my heart just wasn’t 100% into it.
Team Ansca, composed of Gilbert Guerrero and Chia Hwu made an app with Ansca Corona SDK in 6 hours of actual development time at iOSDevCamp 2010. The idea for DIYbuddy came about because Gilbert has been working on DIY projects at home and wanted a way to easily annotate photos of his projects.
The app allows you to take a photo with your iPhone, add lines for measurements and text. You can also save the annotated image to the iPhone Camera Roll and email from your phone. On the iPad, you can annotate photos in your Photo Library, save the image and email from an email program. We think this is a useful tool for anyone doing construction projects, home decorating, and Burning Man art collaborations.
The entire app was written by Gilbert, who did not have a single line of code written until Friday at 9 pm. He had a working prototype on our iPhone AND iPads by noon on Saturday that would draw basic lines and rotate a photo. Chia provided marketing and moral support only, she did not code or create any graphics. By 1 pm Sunday we had an useable app that we showed to the crowd at iOS Dev Camp on both devices.
Hundreds of iPhone and iPad developers are gathered at PayPal’s Town Hall this weekend to make mobile applications.
Team Ansca Hard at Work
Ansca sent a team to develop, we’re on course to have three applications in the final judging on Sunday. Keep up with @ansca progress on Twitter- and come by to say “Hi” if you are here! We have already met Alex Mostoufi from Unicorn Labs who has been showing us the new applications they are writing with Corona.
Come see us demo tomorrow August 22, 2010 from 2-6 pm if you are in the San Jose, CA area! The demos and awards ceremonies are open to the public.
The App Store has chosen the Corona-made Shaken, Not Stirred app for its “What’s Hot” list today, perhaps in anticipation of the winding down summer cocktail season!
Shaken, Not Stirred — created by Bamboudesign — allows users to search for their favorite cocktail recipe by spirit, color, flavor, or theme. If you’re in the mood for a surprise, you can even use the iPhone’s “shake” function to get a random recipe! Beautiful, full-color photos of each cocktail allow aspiring pocket-bartenders to spot-check their concoctions for glass type and garnish choices before serving them up to family and friends.
You can download Shaken, Not Stirred over at the App Store. Remember to enjoy responsibly!
A couple weeks ago, we blogged how smartphone sales were growing in the U.S. and worldwide, opening up a larger market for mobile apps and gaming. Well, it seems like thisis especially true across the Pacific!
Earlier this week, the new iPhone 4 went up for presale in South Korea. The resulting avalanche of preorders (130,000 in 13 hours!) crashed the servers of KT Corp., the Korean iPhone carrier. By comparison, the previous iPhone 3GS presold 60,000 units on its first day in Korea late last year.
Even though these numbers barely compare to U.S. iPhone 4 preorders from this past June, (600,000 on the first day, which also crashed servers) they illustrate the mobile market that is emerging in the Far East. In fact, a quieter announcement last week by Korean-HQ’ed Samsung revealed that its Android-based Galaxy S smartphone has topped 800,000 sales in Korea in under two months.
Back in May, Japan saw the iPhone becoming its best-selling smartphone, comprising of a staggering 72% of all smartphones sold in the country. (head nod to Ansca Mobile Japan)
And then there’s China! The global economic powerhouse finally will permit WiFi-enabled iPhone 4 and iPad sales to its 2 billion-strong population next month. Before this month, Chinese regulators only permitted iPhones to be sold sans WiFi, and subsequent sales were pretty disappointing. However, a WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS was launched in China earlier this this month, and sold out in the Beijing Apple Store within its first 24 hours.
At this very moment, Asia is the mobile market to watch. Expect us to follow-up on this blogpost next month, after the iPhone 4 hits shelves in China — we already have a picture for that!
Robert Stenzinger likes a couple of things: playing guitar and making games. With Corona, he says he can somewhat do both! Below, he details why he feels Corona is the best option for creating graphic/sound-heavy games or, as he calls them, “games that feel good to play.”
Just to get a better sense of your background, what is your experience in app development? Do you have a preferred platform or language?
My development background began in 2nd grade. I was in a class where we were taught BASIC and foundational computer concepts such as the idea of literal and deterministic behavior which was taught to us via the classic “tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich” exercise. The teacher did a great job with the class and left an impression on me that, if you work hard at it, you can make computers do cool stuff. During my formative years, I spent a considerable amount of time with friends playing video games and trying to program our own video games. Actually, I started my first game development company in the early 90′s. It was a learning lab, garage band-style company I did with friends. Although we did not finish our game, we learned a lot and we became the expert creative computer types that corporate America needed in the 90′s.
It was a far easier path to make a living with computing skills then with visual art and music abilities. I never let go of the idea of making games and, more often than not, I’ve been working on some creative computing project. Earlier this year I released my comic-focused CMS platform called Comicaster. It’s open source and over at Google code if you’re interested in checking it out. I use it to power my web comic website, ArtGeekZoo.com.
I often joke that I now consider myself a reformed enterprise architect. Over the years, I’ve programmed in several languages on several platforms: .NET / C#, SQL, JavaScript, Python, and Action Script. I have developed everything from basic web pages to rich UI web pages to games to UI widgets to Flash to databases stored procedures. Most recently, I’ve been studying and building with Lua. It fits really well with my interests and style of programming – it’s a lot of fun, it’s flexible and it’s easy to play with. I have to say Lula has now joined the list of Python, JavaScript, and ActionScript 3 as my preferred languages.
In Doodle Dash!, you guide a cute blue monster named “Dash” through the Doodle forest to collect as many gems as you can before getting caught by the monsters. You’ll wade past evil flying bunnies, bombs, and fat cyclops as you collect gems and yellow stars (which Dash hasn’t quite decided if he likes or not).
Guitar Fretter by Stenzinger Software
Guitar Fretter is an exciting action-puzzle game! Not only do you learn the notes on a 6-string guitar while you play, but the action gets intense as you solve each level, unlock all the strings, and earn huge bonus points for full-matched frets and full-matched strings. Can you defeat the Minions?
Star Poker + by Erin Lin
Star Joker Plus is a video poker game where the Joker is a wild card that can be any card in your hand! Bring the tables to your pocket with this nifty little game, and even try your own hand in the “bounce” stage.
tappixels by William Flagello
tappixels is a simple and original game where you have to tap squares to gain pixels.
Main features include 2 main modes, 2 sub modes, 9 difficulty levels (with a timer), and the ability to share scores via Twitter.
Tumble Bee by Ben Walker
Tumble Bee is a simple, fun and addictive game that will keep you coming back for more!
Although Tumble Bee really loves to fly, he isn’t the best at it. He really needs your help to stay in the air. Try to keep him up for as long as you can by tapping him. Volleying him in the air scores points on each successful tap.
URNoiseMaker v1.1.2 by Berlin Productions
URNoiseMaker comes with over 46 high-quality sound effects that can be accessed immediately at the push of a button.
URNoiseMaker is compatible with both iPhone and Android platforms. This app is modeled after the same on-air sound effects technology used by DJ’s worldwide, except for now it fits in your pocket!
Last Tuesday, the Ansca Mobile team was at the Bay Area Video Game Development Meetup in San Francisco, talking to developers and showing off a preview of Corona Game Edition. It was great to see the thriving community that exists in the Bay Area around the meteorically rising game-building industry.
The most eye-opening experience of the night came from the various game development studios that were in attendance. A few of them came over to the Ansca Mobile booth asking if we could provide them with developers who they could contract to create games with Corona! They elaborated that Corona’s fast turn-around time and rapid, on-device prototyping were especially attractive to them, from a business perspective, and that working with Corona would allow them to build games in a highly efficient manner without sacrificing quality.
If you are interested in contracts or full-time work, join the Ansca Developer Directory of Corona users. The demand for Corona developers is already here, so we’ll do everything we can to put our users in touch with anyone who wants to work with you!
Also — if you haven’t already seen it — here’s the Corona Game Edition video demo that converted a few of those game studios and developers at the meetup:
A couple weeks ago, we blogged how smartphone sales were 
Just to get a better sense of your background, what is your experience in app development? Do you have a preferred platform or language?
