General purpose to use CoronaCards?

[joe528]

I have been using Corona SDK for over an year. It has its strengths but at the same time, it has the weakness that I am thinking to move on to native coding for iOS.

I have read some documents about CoronaCards but I still don’t see the good reason I should use it if I don’t have specific needs.

I mean I don’t expect to use any specific API provided by Corona. I just mean in general, if I am going for iOS native development, are there any “general” reasons I should use CoronaCards and I can take good advantage of it?

[rob]

There are plenty of things but without knowing what you’re moving to native space for, it’s going to be hard to come up with a good example, but I will try.

In Apple’s native land, it’s pretty easy to put a UIImageView (a fixed image) on the screen.  Of course you can move it, fade it and so on, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of a fixed image.  If you want something more interactive, you would potentially use SpriteKit for it or get into native Metal or OpenGL code to build it.   Now lets say you want to build the same app in Android.  Now you’re going to have to build that interactive portion in Java and whatever tools Android provides.   With Corona Cards, your app could use Apple Maps on iOS, Google Maps on Android, and then have the shared block be done in CoronaCards.

Its like the old days of web development.  There are just somethings that were better done in Flash than in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Had Flash translated well to mobile, we likely would be using it today…

[joe528]

I am moving to native coding for these reasons:

(1) For business apps, I am looking to design more native-feel UI. The business app I developed with Corona doesn’t have the native look and kind of outdated.

     Another thing is that I am planning to use webView a lot, and current Corona webView is simply too simple without the features I am looking for.

(2) For games, it’s mainly about performance. From my experience with Corona, it seems the performance (the animations) is not as good as those apps built with native coding when things get complicated.

I still like Corona strengths: Lua & simple APIs. So I am wondering if there are general advantages I can use CoronaCards to blend in to give me some edges during app development.

[rob]

There are plenty of things but without knowing what you’re moving to native space for, it’s going to be hard to come up with a good example, but I will try.

In Apple’s native land, it’s pretty easy to put a UIImageView (a fixed image) on the screen.  Of course you can move it, fade it and so on, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of a fixed image.  If you want something more interactive, you would potentially use SpriteKit for it or get into native Metal or OpenGL code to build it.   Now lets say you want to build the same app in Android.  Now you’re going to have to build that interactive portion in Java and whatever tools Android provides.   With Corona Cards, your app could use Apple Maps on iOS, Google Maps on Android, and then have the shared block be done in CoronaCards.

Its like the old days of web development.  There are just somethings that were better done in Flash than in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Had Flash translated well to mobile, we likely would be using it today…

[joe528]

I am moving to native coding for these reasons:

(1) For business apps, I am looking to design more native-feel UI. The business app I developed with Corona doesn’t have the native look and kind of outdated.

     Another thing is that I am planning to use webView a lot, and current Corona webView is simply too simple without the features I am looking for.

(2) For games, it’s mainly about performance. From my experience with Corona, it seems the performance (the animations) is not as good as those apps built with native coding when things get complicated.

I still like Corona strengths: Lua & simple APIs. So I am wondering if there are general advantages I can use CoronaCards to blend in to give me some edges during app development.