Anyone switched from OSX to Windows recently?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hello

Because the latest mac book pros in my opinion are a failure, and my retina mac book pro is slowly becoming too slow for my daily operations [apart from corona I also do Unity development, photoshop stuff and mostly several projects open at the same time], I am thinking about switching to windows.

I was wondering if someone recently switched from osx to windows and keeps developing corona games.

I’m wondering about how big of a change is it? Does everything work fine regarding development?

I can’t seem to find the list of differences or what works and what does not.

I did try 2 years ago to do something with Corona on windows, and it was a mess. Plenty of things that I required didn’t work or worked differently.

I know that I won’t be able to build directly for ios, but that’s  not a problem, I already have a build server made with corona enterprise, I’m talking about development only.

Thanks

Krystian

#2

I’m using both operating systems with Corona and I can say, it mostly works fine. They do behave a bit different though. For example, some of the methods that just run with a warning on macOS can give you runtime error in Windows. Other than that, they are pretty much the same.

#3

There are three main things to be aware of when going from a Mac to a PC.  

  1. Not all native.* objects may not work on Windows. We do have native.newTextField(), Box() and we just released native.newWebView()'s. This may require you to do more device testing, but with Live Builds, it’s not as big of an issue as it once was.

  2. You can’t build for iOS, macOS or tvOS from a PC. You have to be on a Mac to build for those platforms. You are limited to Android and Windows Desktop (and Win Phone 8 using the Corona Cards based implementation)

  3. We don’t have Enterprise for Windows yet.  

There are other smaller differences as well. If you’re used to using the Simulator to build and install to a device for you, that’s currently a Mac only feature. I think there are some obscure oddities around date/time functions because Windows has it’s on way of keeping time thats different than Unix based OS’s (macOS, iOS, Android) (negative dates, etc.), but over all the platforms are quite close.

There are many people using Windows successfully with Corona SDK to build apps every day.

Rob

#4

Many PC laptops come with touchscreens. Such a bonus when developing for touch-based devices.

#5

I’m using both operating systems with Corona and I can say, it mostly works fine. They do behave a bit different though. For example, some of the methods that just run with a warning on macOS can give you runtime error in Windows. Other than that, they are pretty much the same.

#6

There are three main things to be aware of when going from a Mac to a PC.  

  1. Not all native.* objects may not work on Windows. We do have native.newTextField(), Box() and we just released native.newWebView()'s. This may require you to do more device testing, but with Live Builds, it’s not as big of an issue as it once was.

  2. You can’t build for iOS, macOS or tvOS from a PC. You have to be on a Mac to build for those platforms. You are limited to Android and Windows Desktop (and Win Phone 8 using the Corona Cards based implementation)

  3. We don’t have Enterprise for Windows yet.  

There are other smaller differences as well. If you’re used to using the Simulator to build and install to a device for you, that’s currently a Mac only feature. I think there are some obscure oddities around date/time functions because Windows has it’s on way of keeping time thats different than Unix based OS’s (macOS, iOS, Android) (negative dates, etc.), but over all the platforms are quite close.

There are many people using Windows successfully with Corona SDK to build apps every day.

Rob

#7

Many PC laptops come with touchscreens. Such a bonus when developing for touch-based devices.