newTextField working on simulator but not on iOS7

Solar2D iOS
#81

@David Rangel

1.) How are you offering a “fallback” solution when the public SDK is broken? Apple is pushing its developers to build against iOS 7 and adoption rates are far exceeding iOS 6. While building against 6.1 is an option, when that application is ran on iOS 7, the functionality is still broken. With that being said, massive portions of your “fallback” solution (public build) have broken a lot of your developers applications; much like my own. You are so worried about your reputation and building Corona’s future that all you are doing is creating a horrible and negative impression from your members. I have been in the software game from many years and when major issues arise and prevents your product or “SDK” from working properly on allegedly supported systems, you patch them; not force them to pay for something you are promising in your own documentation and website. Like I said before, holding back a major compatibility patch for graphics 2.0, while awesome but totally unnecessary and useless when it comes to graphic design, is a really poor business decision… At the end of the day, it is your reputation that is on the line not mine and when more developers become annoyed that their apps and reputations are ruined because of your decisions, you will never get that segment back again. 

2.) It might have been a moot point regardless because the service only costed $249/349 a year… So you offer a broken “Starter” option and then bump the price up to $600 a year. Am I missing something or are you really just forcing us to upgrade? Lets be honest also, there is a lot more that is broken in the 1202 “public build” than we are letting on to and you know that there is massive issues with iOS 7.

3.) This is not complex at all. You already check against our user accounts for subscriptions on Corona launch. You create a new table in your database and save the version number on-load and check against it. I could literally write that function in 10 minutes… I am not sure who you are trying to fool, but anybody who has a background in development will see right through that comment.

The solution is to just start using Marmalade. If paying $120 a year and having a stupid splash screen in the app is the only requirement, well what the hell, that seems like a great deal over your $600 solution. I mean why not join the ranks of the wildly successfully PopCap, OMGPOP, Lima Sky, Square Enix, EA, Chillingo, etc… And the promo they have to get 3 months free + a windows dev token + developer Lumina device for free is outrageous! I hate to say it, but I might make the switch.

#82

@jmarchalonis, you couldn’t have said it any better.

Being able to build with the free starter pack? That’s great, but can you not see how major text fields are? We’re not complaining about an extra feature that we’re lacking here, we’re talking about “text fields”. You do understand how basic this is, right?

In my opinion, offering the starter pack to build with, comes along with you upping your subscription from $349 to $588. Yes, once the subscription ends, you definitely have the right to stop providing me with access to Daily Builds, but how on earth can you justify blocking me from building with the last Daily Build I had which I paid for?

Plus, if you want it to be a subscription in such a blunt manner, then why do I not have the option to subscribe for 1 month? Why do you bill me annually?

Once again, how does falling back to a broken build make sense to you? Please try to understand that I’m not talking about a build that doesn’t have enough “features”, I’m talking about a build that can not even provide me with basic “text field input”.

#83

I totally understand that you all need to make money, but I guess my main issue is with the fact that I am a hobbyist and the bump up from 249/349 to 600 is hard to justify where I am not even bringing in that much with my two apps. So that makes me go to the free option but evidently fixes do not occur for it reliably for me to put something out to the public quickly if an issue occurs.

I think most of us on this thread love Corona, have invested a bunch of time and resources into the Corona ecosystem, and most importantly we want to see it thrive as a mobile application platform. I also would hope that you all look at an option for the hobbyist to keep their pro level at a more affordable price. With more of us having our pro subscriptions expire soon it will become more of an issue.

Thanks!

Travos

#84

Just my 2p worth…

There appears to be a number of Corona devs who, having tried to make Android pay, have not succeeded. Myself included.

When my subscription expires I will have to think carefully about renewing. I do not want to pay Pro for cross-platform when my only interest is iOS. I hope the old indie subscription will return!

#85

@David Rangel

Two days and no response… I am waiting to hear a response as to whether you intend to fix the broken public SDK… Since we don’t have to sign an NDA with Corona, we are free to take this conversation elsewhere. If you don’t give a sufficient explanation and timeline for a fix to make the public build compatible with iOS 7, I have no problem writing a lengthly article and passing it to all the tech blogs out there. If you don’t want to listen to your developers and treat them with respect, I am sure you will be more motivated when your reputation is on the line; just like mine, which you ruined because of your business practices. 

@MAS1, twomack33,  appductionstudios, ksan

If you want to send me comments about your current experience and frustrations with Corona for this article, if it shall come to pass, let me know. You are more than welcome to have your voices heard on a grander scale. 

#86

jmarchalonis - thanks for the followup on this. Yesterday was a busy day and I did not get to it.

To answer your question - we have fixed this issue already, it is in daily builds. We will roll up all the changes in daily builds into a public release as soon as possible. There are tons of things going on that have a bearing on this, like the new graphics engine, and we cannot put out a public release at a moment’s notice. But it will come.

I am very sorry your development is being disrupted by this. Keep in mind it happened because of a breaking change on Apple’s side. That is not your fault, but it isn’t ours either. You can clearly fix this in your app today, by using a daily build. Or you can wait a bit and use the next public release. And while it affects you, it doesn’t affect all (or probably even a majority) of our developers.

Having a bug in a platform is not a new thing - we all have them. So if you want to go ahead and write about it, feel free. There isn’t much we can do about it and most developers already understand how these things work.

If you want to discuss further, please feel free to email me directly: david AT coronalabs.com

By the way, for those of you that think Pro is too expensive, we now have Basic too (but beware, it does not include daily builds access).

#87

@ DavidRangel

Thanks for the reply. You seem to just be talking in circles rather than address that issue directly and not reading what i even said for that matter; you just keep repeating what I already know. Its not about a bug, it is you forcing us to give you money by holding the patches hostage… Your answer is cough up the money and shut up; thanks for making that crystal clear. 

As for the basic membership… you have got to be kidding me right?! So you took the free membership and increased the revenue limit, which anybody and do by subscripting to a higher plan when needed. So you are trying to goat members into giving you money for getting nothing over the free membership; that is even if that the free membership still exists. With that move, you have just shown how low and greedy this company really is. You should be ashamed of yourself, i mean, how disgusting and pathetic can you get? 

And I will definitely be writing that article… I will send you a link personally when i do and I will be sure to mention your new “basic” plan… unbelievable. 

* I will not write you directly and i will tell you why… i want the developers who use Corona to see how poorly you treat them. Not only that, but how greedy and money hungry you are. 

#88

jmarchalonis - I don’t think you paid much attention to what Basic is. It adds IAPs to Starter. Clearly it is not the same thing as Starter, that would not make much sense :slight_smile:

I didn’t try to go in circles - I thought I was clear: we cannot do a “patch” right this instant. Hostage taking does not enter the equation. We are aware of the issue and it will get pushed to a new public release as soon as we are able to do so. 

Feel free to write the article and send us a link. We are always open to feedback.

#89

@david ranger

Thanks for the insult, very professional i must say… How can anybody pay attention when you are intentional burying the starter option now? Are you familiar with the legal reference bait and switch? I guess from now on… new members will think there is no starter option and thus padding your greedy pockets even more. You straight up sicken me. 

#90

Lets all take a deep breath. Corona Labs staff has families to support and bills to pay. There is nothing wrong with charging for a product. Demand / supply laws dictate who succeed and who go extinct at the end of the day. I don’t see the recent changes as driven by greed. I think CL is simply trying to adapt and evolve and perhaps making learning mistakes along the way.

I would much rather have them charge so they can get more devs / resources on board and deliver a working product. Lets all try and make this work.

#91

I agree with ksan, lets not get mean and hasty on this thread. I think the goal to figure out what hobbyists that are pro level’s options really are. I think it would be great for Corona to offer a “Grandfather” deal where pro developers that signed up when the prices were a bit more reasonable can keep that rate. I totally understand that Corona wants to use the daily build feature as a selling point of the higher costing licenses and that makes sense. When it comes down it I think a lot of developers need the ability to get fixes for major issues in a timely manner but they have not made a ton of money at this (<200 $ / year) so the expense of the higher cost of the pro level that provides the daily builds has become too much for them. 

I guess what I am trying to get at is that it seems that a user base of your platform is going to get priced out. 

I appreciate David providing input and everyone else doing the same as well. We can have a civil discourse and maybe make some progress on this. If no progress is made then that may be ok too, as we may not be the target dev audience for Corona anymore. 

Travis

#92

Yea when I saw the new Corona business model I thought I would just have to be done using Corona but thankfully I am a college student at the moment and am able to get a discount for being a student.  It is still expensive for a college student like me but it is doable.  Once I graduate however it will be a different story, I will have to look else where to develop as a single person team making hardly any money.  Like @twomack33 said, it could very well be that people like us are not the type of business Corona is looking to get anymore.

#93

I think the latest stable release should be just that stable and daily builds should release new features.  Daily builds are pretty much untested beta versions.  The untested Beta version should not be the only option that works.  I only develop for ios now I was going to go for the ios only option but since the price increase and no ios only option I am looking at developing my next app  in native objective C its a lot more trouble initially but maybe less trouble in the long run.  Time will tell.   

#94

@fastek2000

Your explanation of what “Daily Builds” are is spot on. They are untested beta releases just like nightly builds anywhere else. What the Corona team doesn’t understand is you don’t release a stable build and then not maintain its essential core functions. But objective C is definitely the way to go, but it is going to be a real pain in the neck to get your handle on it. You will more than likely start, get pissed off, then try again and eventually just give up after cracking open the iOS SDK and CocoaTouch frameworks. 

@ ksan

Simply put, what about my family? Do you honestly think what their doing is correct? If any other business ran like this, think of Wordpress, they would be dead in the water. I mean you know how much effort goes into a patch right? You create a simple file with the lines to remove and the code to replace it with. You run it and boom, its patched plan and simple. It takes about 5 minutes of your time to do this. They just are holding the patches hostage so you pay them… I don’t know how else to say it, it is blatantly obvious. And if that is not the case, then they are just terrible programers. I am not going to explain this part, but just google and read on facebook’s walled garden approach. 

@rxmarccall

I doubt that. Real developers that know Objective C and are conformable with the iOS SDK would never deal with this SDK. There are quite a few issues with it that i am not going to go into beyond the basics core functions being incompatible. They want people like us, we are their bread and butter when it comes to business. I have been using Corona since it begain and to see how greedy and desperate they have gotta is straight up ridiculous. Why do you think you think so many legacy developers have left and now use gideros sdk which is free with no limitations; you pay them $149 a year to remove their load screen that is all. You essentially have the Corona Enterprise package for free with them… and as a bonus, the SDK is not bloated + physics is not iffy. It is just not at mature as Corona. 

#95

Travis - your mention of a “grandfathered” price has been in place for a while. Take a look:

http://coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/faqs/#currentsubs

#96

David, I understand the business model and fully support the notion that you have to charge in order to sustain and grow your business. We will all prosper together once the balance is found. Meanwhile I have another problem…

Pay for service on a subscription assumes service will be provided as promised / advertised. I have been waiting for fixes to various parts of the Corona SDK with vast majority of issues stemming from Widget 2.0 library. Since the service I paid for has not worked completely as promised for most of the subscription period, I now feel some form of compensation is in order. 

In other words, if I lease a car I expect it to run fine. If the car has a problem I would get the leasing company give me a repair. If they can’t repair it in time then I would expect them to at least give me a refund for the lease period where the car has been unusable or has performed less than promised. 

Make sense? 

#97

ksan - You are a reasonably guy and I really appreciate that. But I have to disagree a bit here. We all wish Corona (and any other software platform) worked perfectly all the time. But it is frankly impossible. And I’m not just making excuses for us here. If you show me any other platform of this complexity that does not have bugs, I will personally refund your subscription. But that platform does not exist.

I know for a fact that people often complain about our biggest competitor because, not only do they have significant bugs, but people have to wait months (or more) for fixes. We have daily builds which make the wait much shorter (usually). But it is inevitable that we will have bugs (some very significant) and that sometimes schedules will not align to the satisfaction of everyone involved.

With widgets, we specifically made it open source for this reason. And I promise we don’t mean this as an insult. It is just one more option for developers if they *really* need a fix right away that we are not in a position to provide. Widgets is less than 1% of what Corona does, so saying that we have not delivered what you paid for is not quite fair.

In any case - I’m just trying to explain our views and what we are dealing with in a reasonable way. I often get more heat when I do this, but it’s just the way I am - I’d rather try to have a reasonable discussion than just flame people or go silent.

David

Widgets and custom themes
#98

Dear David,

There is a huge difference between core functionality and additional features. A difference between blockers and minor issues. I personally believe a text field is a major component; it’s the most common form of input. Now I’m not saying you should patch all the changes that have been made in Daily Builds into your public release, as a matter of fact, I think that the public release should be kept to a minimum so that users would be tempted to subscribe.

However, here’s where I disagree with you. If your existing users had applications that were already running fine, and you discovered that there is now an issue in a major component that cripples such applications, a patch should be delivered. The application I’m releasing tomorrow is a trip budget application. Can you even imagine how this would function given the text field issue? The user would type $10, see $10 on the screen, then miraculously find that it’s been saved as $100.

This isn’t an issue that people should “wait a bit” for. In my opinion at least. Think of it this way, a new user downloads your public build, tries to simply input some text in his application and fails. How do you think he will view your SDK? Will he be recommending it?

Once again, I’m not saying merge your Daily Builds to the public release. I’m just saying that you now have a major broken component that was already working gracefully. A component that is a deciding factor for many.

#99

Dear David, 

Thank you very much for your response and open dialogue.

For the record, I’m not trying to score a quick refund. I just want issues to be fixed so we can all move forward. What you define as 1% of what Corona SDK does is 100% of the requirement for developers with business apps focus. Hence the discrepancy between CL prioritization vs. customer expectations. So you can consider my effort to be a form of lobbying for priority & attention. 

Regarding your comparisons with competition… For me, your competition is Xcode & ADK. Put very directly, I am choosing Corona SDK for the dual platform delivery capability and the 10X promise… If it fails in either but especially the 10X promise then its time for me to go native. The IOS and Android native development kits are robust and issues are usually dealt with on a faster basis. Of course I don’t expect to compare the resources Apple and Google has at their disposal with the humble Corona Labs team size but this is what you’re up against in terms comparison.

I understand that currently the mobile app revenue stream is biased towards the game industry and perhaps that is driving your decisions in what makes the 99% and 1% of Corona SDK. The global business application & services revenue stream is greater than the global game industry revenue by an order of magnitude. The business app share in mobile world is growing steadily and is projected to become the way companies deliver services and do business (in conjunction with the Cloud) as we go forward. Hence, IMHO, it is rather shortsighted of CL to continue with the highly biased prioritization of what gets fixed & implemented.

While all this is somewhat related, my thoughts are perhaps taking this thread off topic. Lets continue discussing on the widget forum if you like. Thanks once again.

Regards,

Kerem

#100

David,

Why is it that the more and more i read your replies i get the feeling you have absolutely no idea what we are talking about? Don’t get me wrong, you are a good sales and company “yes” man, but you just can’t grasp the understanding of what a “patch” is… And now you are trashing your competition over having bugs? You know what happened with CLEAR did that right? Corona is slowly becoming the CLEAR of RAD KITS. Focus on fixing your own SDK and stoping make excuses… If i had your mentality, I would be out of business in no time. Forgive me as I digressed… Which makes me wonder if you are on the development team or a customer service personal? If you are the latter, i would prefer speaking with Rob Miracle who I know he is indeed a developer and understands what a “patch” is. At least if I spoke with him, he might say that there is no way to patch the public build due to them not being two separate build platforms, but rather just a older build of the same platform. But in doing so, he would try his best to offer a work around… I am sure there is one other than forcing us to upgrade our memberships. in fact I know there is because somebody was able to fix this issue with modifying a textbox rather than textfield but i have not been able to replicate his fix. As for what this 1% vs 99% talk, it just really shows how out of touch with your developers and reality as a whole the Corona management really is. In the real world, it is 30% vs 70% and rich business apps are out pacing games (especially 2D games! ) 2 to 1. 

So Rob Miracle, I know you are subscripted to this thread… Please come and help us find a workaround for this issue. And if you say there is none and nothing you can do, i will be disappointed, but at least i will get this from one of the most respected developers at Corona and one who is linked to the development team and has helped me in the past.

Jason