What Will Happen To Corona With Apple's New Announcements (iOS 8, swift, etc.)

General (non-technical) Off-Topic
#31

Works fine for me (and I’m using Safari on a Mac as well).

It would be possible to produce Swift for Android. You’d have problems implementing the Apple library, and it is a cert. that Apple would make it as painful as possible, but it is doable. 

The thing is, why would you bother. We’ve already got languages that do most of those things, lua being one of them. I take the point that it’s better than Objective-C if you aren’t a pro, but Corona still looks better for the reasons Jay writes about. It’s not really about the programming language, as long as you can do the basics in them - old Microsoft BASIC would drive you nuts but python vs lua vs ruby vs javascript (though I prefer CoffeeScript) is … meh. 

99% of the language problems I have are the same two errors, typing blink rather than blonk and it being assumed to be a default variable. It would be quite nice to have mandatory declaration, and accidentally using . and : on functions and members. Neither of which are any sort of problem.

One of the things I really like about Corona is that while it is possible to construct programs professionally, it also encourages new programmers to do a ‘poke and see’ approach to coding, which I always thought was a good way to learn. So you can do display.newRect() … and it does. I always thought that was a gateway in, you didn’t have to have reams of libraries and code just to make it do something. But because lua can do OOP and all that sort of stuff, you can construct programs in a coherent way as well.

PS: any chance of putting chaining on the setFillColor() type methods.

(or of you American folks learning how to spell ‘Colour’ :slight_smile: )

#32

I’ve asked engineering about the chaining.  No promises. 

Sure Swift could take off as a generic language.  But the language is pretty much useless without functional runtime library and I doubt that Apple will ever want to ever support Android.  So like Objective C stayed in the Apple World and didn’t make many excursions outside of their sphere of control, Swift will very likely follow the same course.

Of course Swift only addresses the SmallTalk dropped on top of C issue that was part of the problem when dealing with Native iOS development.  The incredibly complex and verbose Cocco Framework is still in place.  Trying to understand delegates and message passing is still there.  At least the swath of []'s that confuse the bajeebies out of us old school C/Java/JavaScript/PHP peeps seems to be out of the way.

Rob

#33

I don’t see Swift as a threat to Corona SDK bottom line at all. Comparing Apples to Oranges (heh heh, see what I did there? :wink: never gets you anywhere. I have always thought and continue to think that the biggest threat to Corona SDK’s future is Corona Labs itself.

Going forward, the expectation for an easy to learn, flexible SDK to be also very robust will keep getting stronger and stronger… All the Corona SDK features coming out soon (ie Windows support) will likely set us six months back in terms of stability and regression issues. This is what I predicted with G2 and it is more or less what we got back then. We still have fundamental issues with key building blocks such as webViews, widgets, mapViews and more.

Unless Corona Labs get better in shipping more stable code and faster at solving issues, I foresee that they will go extinct sooner or later. Stability, dependability and continuity is everything in this cut-throat business environment. Corona Labs leadership still favor features over stability and that is a big problem.

#34

Is Windows support coming out soon ? I hadn’t heard that - I knew that HTML5 was in beta (alpha ?) but didn’t know they were doing Windows.

Agree completely with RobM ; however good or bad Swift is, and tbh it isn’t that much better than lua or a lot of other scripting languages, it’s not a patch on Corona as a development system. I’ve been programming for nigh on 40 years and my first thought when seeing Objective-C was “WTx is that ?”.

#35

This was announced in Q4/2013

http://coronalabs.com/blog/2013/10/29/windows-phone-8-and-windows-store-support-coming-to-corona-sdk-in-2014/

and then an update more recently 

http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/03/13/windows-phone-8-update/

No idea when it will hit the beta stage but it should be sometime this year I suppose unless it gets yanked off. 

It is going to be interesting to see how it all balances, Corona Cards, HTML5, Windows 8 Builds, IOS8 release, New Plugins, Maintenance & bug fixes… I’m sure its not easy to be Walter & David putting these priorities in order. 

#36

Just to be clear:  Windows 8 **Phone** support, you will **not** be building x86 apps anytime soon.  This is the Metro/Windows App Store type apps only.  It’s getting close.

#37

Question: Does that mean it will support Windows RT?

#38

Initially we will only support Windows 8 phones (.xap or zap files).  After we get that going, then we will work on support for .appx files that will run on Metro/RT devices.

Rob

#39

Is it currently possible for an Enterprise user to build iOS plugins using Swift ? 

#40

Well, you never know, but in the past (IOS6 ->7) things have gone quite smootly. Really depends on how much work you have done and how much is left.

From my experience, don’t do too much work with a game before releasing version 1. Its a hassle to change fundamental things once it is too ready and the gamers may not like it anyway. Test it live as soon as possible, get paid later.

#41

I do agree, if the game is ready release it !

#42

Interesting development, isn’t it?

Swift offers a script-based language quite similar to Lua, for free, and access to all the Objective C APIs.

I and I’m sure others will be interested to hear Corona’s response to this.

#43

Very interesting! iOS 8 has 3 new APIs: TouchID, HealthKit, and HomeKit. I can’t wait to see what will happen.

#44

It’s too early to speculate what all this means, but I think Objective C and the insanely complex API that is iOS is a real turn off to many developers.  Lua is a much easier language to master and the Corona SDK API’s are far easier to work with than Apples.  Where I think Swift may have an impact would be for people who want to do Enterprise (or Corona Cards) work and are intimidated by Objective C.  I see this as a good thing.

At the end of the day Swift is still only going to build iOS apps, so for those looking to do Cross-platform, Swift has little to no impact.  As far as the new API’s go, there is some good stuff in there and opens the door to a bunch of new types of apps to be created.

Now what Corona Labs will do with all of this is still up in the air.  Like you we got access to Yosemite, Xcode 6 and Yosemite yesterday and are starting to toy with it.  It’s way too early to speculate about what features we will and won’t support.   All we can say is we will not officially support Yosemite, Xcode6 and iOS 8 until they are live and we’ve had time to test our stuff thoroughly.  We will get you the ability to compile against the beta iOS 8 target some point during the beta period.

Finally, do not go and install Yosemite or iOS 8 on any machine you depend on to work.  We know that Corona SDK isn’t working on Yosemite right now, and  early beta’s of iOS can render your device somewhere between frustrating and near impossible to use.   Only play with these on devices/computers you can afford to be without.

Rob

#45

How about Metal?  Will Corona remain dependent on OpenGL ES or will you be able to make calls directly to the A7 processor for the significantly higher graphical performance and lower CPU overhead?

#46

Too early to speculate.   A 10x improvement is speed is worth a lot, but also it makes crossPlatform a lot harder to do.

Rob

#47

i’m developing a game using corona. What do you guys recommend, do i stop until the new announcements by corona and apple about ios8 came to public?

I’m afraid that after i spent many time developing and money to the corona liscence, i’ll have to change a bunch of things.

#48

It would be nice to have some very common or promised features in Corona (like printing, or displaying a spinner during the completion of o for statement, or the ability to build for Windows, announced 5 months ago). Corona can’t compare with Swift for the moment but things could be change if some company could provide a compiler to “build for Android”.

For the time being, Corona is doing the job, as far as I’m concerned I will take a look to Swift but hope Corona will keep going on and improve.

#49

@Ziad.Ali, the announcements by Apple this week really shouldn’t have any impact on your current app development plans.  It will be a good 3-4 months before iOS 8 and such becomes available to build for.  Even then Corona SDK will be building for the new operating system.  This literally has no impact on people who want to use Corona SDK to build apps.

@jch_apple, the Windows support is getting closer.  It’s very time consuming to move a product with the complexity of Corona SDK to another platform.  Swift has ZERO value to the Android market.  Even if someone ported the language to build for Android, you still have radically different SDK’s to build for iOS and Android.  Corona bridges that.  Think of Swift as the “Lua” in the equation.  Lua is Lua, but Corona SDK is the parts that let you do the things you want to do (draw images, interact with them, etc.) 

Rob

#50

I was about to purchase to get the graphics 2.0 and the newOutline working, but I’m stuck. What guarantee do i have that if I shell out $588 today I can still build/submit to Apple 6-7 months from now… or am I missing something here entirely.