Plugin Future

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#41

Into-it, now to address a couple of your comments :slight_smile:

Saying that we “do not wish to support…” is unfair. If you read this thread, you will see that we are saying the opposite. We do care about adding support for services and we are working hard towards that. It is coming. We care a lot.

As for your comparison to Gideros (another good tool), the price comparison today is $149 (for their Indie) vs. $199 (for our Indie) or $349 (for our Pro). I don’t think that is a huge difference, but sure, there is a difference. But we think Corona is well worth the price we charge. 

Again, we are addressing the plugin issue soon. We hear you. And we definitely care.

#42

Sorry if I sounded judgmental about you “not wanting” to support certain libraries and features! What I meant was that although you may wish to support them, you may simply not have the man power to carry out supporting more and more features while maintaining old ones. Also for Gideros, the 150$ Indie license covers both iOS and Android. Their Pro license is required only if you make in excess of 100k a year from your apps.

However, price is not the main issue her as I think what Corona offers may very well be worth more than that considering just how fast it is to develop with. The main concern is and always has been plugins and libraries. Because we don’t think it is realistic for Corona Labs staff to maintain all the libs on their own, we thought it would be a good idea if Pro devs were allowed native access to enable us to do some of the heavy-lifting with 3rd party libraries.

#43

It’s many years I’ve been using Corona and I really like developing with this SDK, it’s fast and very easy to use.

The only problem is that sometimes you need to do something that Corona can’t do, and in that case you’re stuck.

Yes, there’s Enterprise. I gave it a try (while also learning some OBJ C), and in a few days was able to create some simple plugins and and extend some functionalities that currently Corona does not provide (Facebook native dialog, copy text to the clipboard, getting some exif data from photos).

But the thing is, as an Indie developer, I can’t justify an Enterprise license… I don’t need to have access to OBJ C libraries all the time.
Instead I would like to work with Corona Pro as usual and then, from time to time when I need to do something that Corona can’t do (simple stuff, for example the iOS Facebook native dialog) be able to create native libraries / plugins.

You can’t justify a 1000$ license just to create a Facebook native dialog or some graphic effects on an image, right?

IMO, Corona labs should:

  1. Lower price for the Enterprise , at around 500/600$ (at least for indies… maybe a Enterprise Indie edition?)

  2. Create a  plug-in marketplace (similar to Appcelerator Marketplace) where developers can create plugins and sell them (giving Coronalabs a percentage of the sales)

That’s what I hope Gluon is going… otherwise, I don’t know…

#44

Amen.

#45

Gluon will be what you said in #2.