Action-packed release!

Posted by Walter

Walter Luh, Ansca Mobile

Today’s release is action-packed! We’re announcing so many things that it’s hard to know where to start…

Scratching the surface

Let’s start with the latest version of Corona SDK. It’s a monumental release accumulating a ton of features, improvements, and bug fixes from all the daily builds over the past 4 months.

The first change you’ll notice is cosmetic. Corona has a new icon thanks to Gary Luetchford, winner of the Corona Icon Challenge. Congrats Gary — it looks great on the dock!

We’ve also made big changes under the hood on our servers. We’ve revamped our build system to improve build times, especially for Android developers, to handle the exponential increase in server load over the past few months. For example, Android device builds that are up to 2.5x faster than they were in the previous public release.

Subscribers will be able to take advantage of these improvements immediately (you probably already are if you’re using a recent daily build). Trial users, on the other hand, should expect slowdowns in builds (iOS or Android) depending on the load of the servers and the priority in our build queue.

We’ve also taken some of the coolest tools from the Corona ecosystem and bundled them into our DMG (in the “Tools” folder) with a 30-day free trial:

• Corona Project Manager is everyone’s favorite tool for managing Corona projects, editing with code completion, and more.
• Kwik is a plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS5 that allows you to create comics and interactive books for iOS and Android devices, with animations, buttons and sound, directly from your PSD files.
• Spriteloq lets you take your Flash SWF movies and export them into Corona. It’s a must-have for any Flash developer that wants to smoothly integrate their valuable Flash art and animations into their Corona based mobile applications.

If you want to create multiplayer games, you can also take advantage of PubNub. Check out the sample code in “SampleCode/Networking/MultiplayerPubNub“.

That’s just a small taste of what’s new. There are a ton of awesome features that I haven’t even mentioned (and some that I’m about to get to). You can check the complete list here.

LaunchPad

If you’ve been following our daily builds, you might have noticed some mysterious check-in summaries with phrases like “secret feature”. Actually, it turns out it’s not just one secret feature; it’s a whole constellation of features, so we decided to give it the name Corona LaunchPad.

Even though Corona makes it a lot easier to create an app, it still takes considerable effort and focus to make an app get noticed. The whole idea behind LaunchPad is to jumpstart that process for you.

We’ve created a Marketing 101 Guide that will walk you through everything you need to maximize the discovery of your app. We’ve also redesigned our Showcase so you can establish a premier web presence for your app portfolio.

On top of that, we’ve partnered with top app review sites like Technobrains and AppShrink.com. App review sites are a great way to get exposure on your app and to see how your app fares against the competition. We’ve negotiated exclusive discounts to get featured reviews. In addition, you can get a complementary review as an App of the Week winner. Our team will also select apps for additional app reviews and special placements. More exciting announcements to come!

One of the keys to successfully marketing your apps is to understand your users. That’s where analytics come in. Analytics has been available in Corona for awhile, but we always felt the experience of creating app id’s through a 3rd party provider was a little bit clumsy. It was great for advanced users, but we decided we could make this experience so much easier by offering you some home-grown analytics services to complement the advanced stuff.

Starting with today’s release, you’ll get access to basic analytics on your app without lifting a finger — no more jumping through hoops and fiddling with clumsy app id’s. You’ll instantly be able to see crucial data on downloads and users, and gain insight into how users are using your app.

To help you get acquainted with the sheer volume of resources, information, and services at your disposal, we’ve created an overview and a LaunchPad Dashboard.

One more thing…

One thing I almost forgot to mention about LaunchPad is that we announced a couple of key partnerships.

On the gaming side, we’ve partnered with PapayaMobile to offer developers a fast and easy way to reach 22 million users across the globe especially in Asia. As part of this partnership, we’ve integrated their SDK into Corona. As part of that process, we’ve unified the game network API’s under a single “gameNetwork” library interface. In addition, there will be opportunities to promote your app on Papaya’s network such as being featured as their “App of the Day.”

Last but not least, we’re introducing a new monetization option — ads!

Now, I know we took a long time to get this to you and so thank you all for hanging in there. We wanted to make sure that if you put ads into your app, you’d be able to succeed in monetizing. It requires your app to reach a lot of eyeballs (that’s where the other LaunchPad services come in) and it also requires the ad network to serve up quality ads.

So we partnered with InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network. They serve over 36 billion mobile ad impressions monthly across 165 countries. We seeded the new library to a couple of developers and the preliminary data suggests that InMobi could generate up to 3x more revenue than AdMob!

To get started with the new “ads” library, go to the Ads Guide.

To infinity and beyond!

We’re incredibly excited about what’s coming ahead. There are a lot more exciting things coming down the pipe. I can’t say too much but our goal is to enable you in every sense of the word from creating great apps to reaching a broad audience to even building a career.

A lot of you have told us that our work on Corona has changed your life. Well, I want to close by saying that the feeling is mutual. We built Corona so that you could build the best apps on the planet — and have fun doing it. And from what we’ve seen, you’ve surpassed our wildest expectations. The quality of apps, games, and eBooks we’ve seen is so inspiring that sometimes we do a double-take.

Your success is our success. Thank you for helping us make Corona the best mobile platform on the planet!

Walter

Carlos Icaza, Ansca Mobile

I want to also say thanks to all of you for your trust, and for the apps you have developed with Corona SDK. There are two things I want to highlight, as Walter did a great job in letting you know what is in the truly action-packed release.

Notice how Walter now calls Corona the best mobile platform in the planet – and that is because you have gotten us here and also, unlike our competitors, our success lies within your success. I receive countless emails from you, direct Twitter messages, and even messages from you to my personal e-mail account — all sharing how great Corona is and how it has allowed you to break into the mobile app development market(something you previously thought was possible only after countless hours of reading and learning Objective-C or Java).

The one message that was loud and clear from all your feedback was “How do I get my app exposed?” In other words, “app discovery.” We started by doing some co-marketing with some of you; we did some press releases and other initiatives to get you exposure — some of it worked, some of it didn’t. But one thing that we collectively knew was that Corona as a tool lived up to its challenge. But after your app was done, it was like “Then what?”

And that’s what led us to LaunchPad.

In order for us to better engage with you and your apps, and for you to become successful and have your apps break above the fold, LaunchPad was born. It is not about if I had xyz feature, I’d be successful — it is about exposure. And via LaunchPad and the partnerships we have now formed, we believe we are well-positioned to help your app reach new heights.

That’s why we call Corona a platform. We are no longer just a tool, but a combination of the best damned tools on the planet and the best customer service we can provide to you, as a company, for better app discovery. If we succeed at making you successful, then we are successful. It is, a win-win scenario for both you and us.

The other thing I want to mention is that we are open to working with you at any level, from exploring joint ventures into uncharted territories (i.e. untested mobile platforms) to working closely with you about other potential monetization venues. In the coming weeks, we will be reaching out and engaging with you more about what is ahead in all aspects of app discovery.

I echo Walters sentiments about how much you have entrusted us and how much you have told us how Corona has changed your life. And with that, go code the next #1 app! We are here to help and we will make it happen.

And stay tuned, we are not done yet. More fun things to come…

Carlos