Happy Birthday Corona: Still fun after all these years

Posted by Walter

This week marks the 3 year anniversary of when I first started writing Corona SDK‘s first lines of code. It’s quite humbling to think how far we’ve come since those precocious times.

For fun, I took a nostalgic look back through our code base and grabbed screenshots of what Corona looked like in its infancy. I also went back through sample Lua code and (re)discovered how much Corona has evolved since those halcyon days.

When I starting designing Corona, I thought a lot about our experience working on Adobe’s Flash Lite, especially the actual process of shipping software for mobile. Those (pre-iPhone) days were what I call the dark ages of mobile software development because development was not just difficult; it was an endless cycle of pain.

So I knew that it wasn’t enough for the technology behind Corona to support insanely great apps. The real challenge was to package everything up so that people would find it simple and enjoyable to work with.

Early Corona vector rectangle demo (circa May 2008)

I wanted the developer experience to be insanely great, because if the developer experience was awesome, that meant the developer had more time to make the end user’s experience even more awesome.

The first significant milestone was getting the rendering engine to display rectangles (right) in what would ultimately become the Corona Simulator. At this point, I hadn’t yet gotten around to adding device skins, so it’s just rendering OpenGL into a plain Cocoa NSWindow.

Now here’s the really interesting part. The Lua code looks nothing like the modern Corona API — just a couple of global functions:

As you can see, the display library and the notion of display objects didn’t exist yet.

Early Corona rectangle animation demo (circa May 2008)

The next major milestone (right) was adding support for alpha blends in the OpenGL engine and adding a timer loop for animation that would periodically call a Lua listener. By this point, I had settled on the name “display” for what’s now our trusty display library, but I hadn’t quite settled on the event model.

The following is the basic code that handled what is now known as “enterFrame” events (minus the setup code that randomly positioned the rectangles and randomly assigned color). Incidentally, this was the proto-code for what would ultimately become our Fishies sample app:

The original idea in this code was to have a designated global function called “onSystemEvent” to handle all events where the type of event was determined by the string value of “key”. I soon realized this was too simple, especially when it came time to add support for touch events which were driven by user interaction, not by underlying system events.

Fishies ('Finding Nemo') demo app (circa June 2008)

Funnily enough, when Carlos and I demo’d these bouncing rectangles on the iPhone, the folks who eventually became our VC’s were thoroughly unimpressed. It was only until they saw images that they started to see the potential.

Of course, back in those days investors still thought in terms of the operator walled garden. Our VC’s were a little more savvy but still questioned the commercial viability of apps, so I had to pitch this demo as an app that a company like Disney/Pixar would make to promote the movie Finding Nemo.

In any case, it’s at this point that our venerable image API finally makes its appearance:

Corona simulator with iPhone skin (circa Oct 2008)

Embarrassingly, it would be months before I got around to skinning the simulator window. During those intervening months, I ended up spending a lot of time on under the hood enhancements, getting parity between both Mac and iOS builds, and even getting a port on Nokia’s ill-fated Symbian Series 60 platform among other things. But it wasn’t until device skins were added did the Corona Simulator really feel like a simulator.

At the time, it was hard to imagine how far things would go. When Carlos and I connected with the folks at ReallyMedia/HDInteractive, they created the first Corona-based app and in the process showed us things we didn’t think were yet possible with Corona. It was at that point that we realized we were onto something really special.

When our advisor and fellow Adobe veteran, David Lazarony, test drove Corona in its early days, he expressed similar sentiments:

What is so great about Corona is it is so easy to just write code and get things working. You immediately see your results on the screen. That is what was so great about Applesoft or Logo. But they were just toy graphic languages. Yours is first class.

I hope you feel the same way today.

Happy Birthday Corona!