Our community of developers is a major part of what makes Corona so awesome. Many of our developers have put a ton of hard work into all kinds of projects and enhancements. In case you missed these discussions in the forums, here are some of the newest community-made plugins available in the Corona Marketplace.
Near Field Communications (NFC)
Spiral Code Studios released a plugin that lets you access your device’s NFC system. NFC is used for payment processors, device-to-device communications, and other functions where having one device in close proximity to another device may be beneficial.
This is an Android-only plugin since Apple does not currently allow access to the NFC chip. Also, at this time, it only supports NDEF tags. Finally, you’ll need Corona SDK Daily Build 2016.2869 or later to use it.
To get started, activate the plugin and proceed to the documentation.
Twilio (VoIP)
Twilio is an Android plugin created by Deleur Apps that lets your app make Voice-over-IP phone calls (VoIP). Including this plugin lets you incorporate voice chats between two clients or call any phone number in the world. To get talking, sign up with Twilio, activate the plugin, and view the documentation for implementation details.
GameKit
Warren Fuller recently released GameKit , an alternative to the Game Center plugin. With GameKit, games on iOS can take advantage of all the features in Apple’s social gaming network with the exception of voice chat. GameKit enables your users to track their best scores on a leaderboard, compare achievements, invite friends to play a game, and start multiplayer games through auto-matching. Go to the store to activate the plugin and check out the documentation.
Physics Body Editor
Scott Harrison has provided a plugin that uses output from the Physics Body Editor to produce usable code for the Corona’s physics engine. Using this, you can easily create complex physics bodies, including concave bodies, that work with Box2D physics. If this plugin could be valuable to you, activate it and examine the documentation.
DreamIo
Scott Harrison has also provided a plugin for DreamIo, a simple service that offers cross-platform leaderboards for your app. If you need leaderboards to work on all platforms, this is a good solution to consider. Start by activating the plugin and read the documentation about how to use it.
Photo Lib Plus
Deleur Apps is back with a helpful photo library plugin. This plugin lets you get a list of images from your photo album, copy those images to your app’s sandbox, and make thumbnails for images. Currently, this is an Android-only plugin. To begin, activate the plugin and read its documentation.
Conclusion
Corona Labs is very proud of our community of developers and the creative ways they have chosen to help expand our platform!
If you have an idea for a plugin, you can contribute too. Corona SDK users can easily build Lua plugins, and if your idea involves a native feature, upgrade to Corona Enterprise to begin creating more advanced plugins.
Join us in forums to discuss our community-built plugins. What would you like to build?