The blog has not been updated since early February. Is there any reason why?
Even what must be the easiest post to make - From The Forums - has not been posted. I think there’s been some absolute gold in the last couple of months.
This is a real shame as blog activity for a company is indicative of activity in general at the company - even if actual activity levels prevent writing activities.
Please, CoronaLabs, give us something to read!
Contributor articles would be a great place to start…
Dang it Horacebury, you beat me to it! I’ve been counting the day for two weeks now, waiting for tomorrow, the day where I could say: “Well, it’s been two months without a single blog post now!”.
That’ll inspire your confidence, as a budding developer looking for a framework!!!
I still stand by my case about the website:
The opening page should just be a video montage of high impact, high production value Corona games, interspersed with some coding/live build footage. Can’t think of a better way to convince and entice game devs.
Plenty of content to choose from, and you can record half of that just hooking up your iPhone to Quicktime on a Macbook or iMac.
Come’on Corona. Either you invest in your PR and communication or you don’t. But expect any returns without doing the investments first.
Keep this alive by posting tomorrow!
You’re right - CoronaLabs should, if they can, invest more in their PR.
Direct action in communities is one way; Creating free events to bring people in. Corporate integration; Building apps for bigger companies and having them promote the platform as the way forward. Education; Offering training to universities, colleges or even schools. And of course there’s tonnes of meetups out there which would love an excuse to put an event on with branding and signage.
I get that it’s all about budget and if the money isn’t there, then it’s not there. But a blog post can’t be that hard, can it?
Also, if possible, bring back comments on blog posts. I’m not sure what looks worse, no blog posts for months ( i.e. no activity within Corona Labs ) or blog posts with no comments on ( i.e. no activity within the community )
Sorry guys, this is all on me.
I get people asking me to post guest blog posts all the time (or hoping we will pay them for generic content), but those are almost always spam content that you don’t want. I really would like to have some guest posts from you the community, not someone with some spamish useless filler content.
I stopped From the Forums because we went like a month where the only things being asked in the forums were problems. There wasn’t any blog-worthy posts. However, over the past couple of months, that has changed and there have been some good discussion topics, and I really should resume the from the forum posts, but I got out of the habit and again, that’s on me.
I miss the days when developers were contributing to the blog.
Now I do have several featured apps/games that I could write up. I’ll make it my effort to get at least one of those published for you next week.
Rob
hi Rob,
Thanks for the reply. Now that I know this, I’ll try and think of helpful content for the blog that I could supply!
Cheers,
Thomas
@Rob,
Unfortunately I doubt I’ll ever get chance to join in with this myself, but how about setting up some kind of a Corona dev challenges page, like Codepen has?
My thinking is that you could create a new “Challenges” category within the forum and every month post a new discussion within there, setting a new theme for Corona devs to submit entries to. Only Corona staff should be able to start new threads and perhaps also shut the comments off for older threads each time you post a new.
Then every time a new theme is started, write up a blog post about any notable entries from the last.
I don’t think prizes are needed - most developers would just be glad to get a write up on something they’ve written, and I’m sure at least some entries would be viable releasable games so it’s an opportunity to get some free exposure too. But mostly, it gives you something to blog about every month that’s genuinely interesting for the community and doesn’t need much time to think up.
There are a few designers who post artwork to these forums too. Entries could be either code or artwork. It’d be really nice if designers posted artwork for developers to use in their dev entries - see who comes up with the best use for a particular graphical asset. Again, this gives exposure to said artists too - I’m sure people would join in.
Perhaps not too late for Easter to be the first theme either, if you want to give this a shot?
Thanks @Rob for getting back to us on this and owning it. That means a lot.
Here’s another idea: Reposting some of the old articles with an update edit to bring them back into relevance. I remember at least one article I submitted over 5 years ago on multitouch pinch-rotation.
I have another couple of ideas to write up, too, so it would be great to see this sort of thing make a come back. If members know it’s an option I think we’ve got some great people here to make content.
Do you have a URL for the post? I know we lost a lot of posts in some migrations to new websites.
Rob
FWIW, the blog got some love today!
Rob
That’s great news Rob! Thanks for picking this up!
I’m thinking about a series of posts myself, on code architecture - will keep you posted. No obligations of course, all under the “feel free to use it or leave it unused” framework 
Awesome post @Rob!
Some ideas for future blog entries (the following is as an expansive list as I can come up with; please forgive me if anything has been well covered in the past)…
Review plugins in the marketplace. Either the most recent plugin or some commonly used / underrated plugins. Posts could include: a simple review of a plugin to give it some love in the marketplace / boost sales; Developer accounts of using plugins - pros & cons; Plugin developer’s review of their plugin or others plugins. Could be called " From the Marketplace".
Re-birth of From the Forum. I loved that series.
Re-enable comments on blog posts. Please.
Keep a thread in the forums specifically for suggestions for the blog.
Reach out to developers who have posted on the forums about their recently publishing or upcoming apps, asking them to review their production and experience building it with Corona. Also include content providers who post media libraries on the forums. Could be called " Exposure".
Reach out to developers who have posted on the blog in years gone by for a follow up/refresher of old post.
Re-birth of the community video call (can’t remember what it was called but it was on Hangouts.) Host it on YouTube, get prominent devs, plugin contributors, etc involved and increase the Corona SDK YouTube content.
Perhaps a series on how to build popular games (which were perhaps not built with Corona) in Corona. Angry Birds is the obvious one, but there is a universe of games and apps (apps- which should be given special love!) out there to be built in Corona. Could be called " Remade With Corona".
" Framework Highlight" or " OpenSource Spotlight" - Review libraries and frameworks available from github and other sources, not just the marketplace and forums. Could even ask for re-posting of articles posted on those sites - the occasional ReadMe’s is article-worthy.
Following on from that, " DevKit" could be a series detailing the tricks and tools which developers use to build apps. Everything from VS Code to physics body generators.
Highlight posts on StackExchange about Corona (not just the forums). Easy searches: [corona] [corona-sdk]
One particular post I’ve meant to write for a long time is the most common physics engine mis-takes/understandings : Everything from using a timer in collision listeners to moving display groups of bodies. There are huge numbers of posts about these at regular intervals. I’m sure the widget library has the same thing going on; The scrollView and tableView widgets certainly have plenty of misunderstandings posted.
Engineer posts. I don’t know about anyone else, but I have no idea who is on the team at CoronaLabs. I would LOVE to hear from them! “Welcome to XYZ developer” or a post by them on what they do, where they can be found on the web or anything they’re interested in posting about. The same could be said for management, too.
Promoted posts. As long as it’s not dominant and is clearly marked and tagged as such, could be a beneficial for CoronaLabs and bring exposure to services, tools or just sites out there which Corona developers may not have seen… Your typical promotional article.
Industry News - changes to the gaming / mobile app industry explained. eg: Apple recently emailed developers about changes to the notorizing process.
Best Practices - Technical articles on how to approach common subjects like security, service consumption all the way to api library usage.
Survey - Would be interesting to get some information about Corona developer demographics, where we all are and where the closest communities are/might be possible. Eg: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#geography
When I first started using Corona, one of the things that attracted me to it was the community. I really appreciated the blog posts and being able to easily read everyone’s comments. For a while, there, was “Tutorial Tuesdays,” which I thought was especially helpful. Eventually, we got “Forum Fridays.” But now we are going 2 months between posts and there’s no way to even comment on them? It’s really disheartening and feels like Corona isn’t trying to foster community like they used to. I love a lot of these suggestions. I know they take a lot of work. If I were to prioritize, I would say, do the following 3 things:
On the homepage, highlight apps made with Corona. That’s one of the biggest selling points for a lot of folks.
Have 1 blog post/week. This shows that you still care and that the community can expect regular updates.
Allow commenting on blog posts. This shows that the community is vibrant and active.
I am glad to see this discussion before I posted a thread regarding the lack of update. The lack of blog update seems to imply the company is fading away and they don’t feel excited to share anything with the community anymore or simply they don’t have anything exciting to share. Are we in the stage that the current SDK is just about minor bug fixes? Is there anything else we can be excited about in the upcoming weeks or months? The subscription for my full screen and AdMob plugin just expired and I am not sure if I should be investing anymore money and time into this SDK. I hope someone from the Corona team can tell us what is going on behind the scene.
Would it be possible to get a Meet The Team type page on the main site because, as @horacebury mentioned, other than a new people I have no idea who Corona actually is right now?
Dang it Horacebury, you beat me to it! I’ve been counting the day for two weeks now, waiting for tomorrow, the day where I could say: “Well, it’s been two months without a single blog post now!”.
That’ll inspire your confidence, as a budding developer looking for a framework!!!
I still stand by my case about the website:
The opening page should just be a video montage of high impact, high production value Corona games, interspersed with some coding/live build footage. Can’t think of a better way to convince and entice game devs.
Plenty of content to choose from, and you can record half of that just hooking up your iPhone to Quicktime on a Macbook or iMac.
Come’on Corona. Either you invest in your PR and communication or you don’t. But expect any returns without doing the investments first.
Keep this alive by posting tomorrow!
You’re right - CoronaLabs should, if they can, invest more in their PR.
Direct action in communities is one way; Creating free events to bring people in. Corporate integration; Building apps for bigger companies and having them promote the platform as the way forward. Education; Offering training to universities, colleges or even schools. And of course there’s tonnes of meetups out there which would love an excuse to put an event on with branding and signage.
I get that it’s all about budget and if the money isn’t there, then it’s not there. But a blog post can’t be that hard, can it?
Also, if possible, bring back comments on blog posts. I’m not sure what looks worse, no blog posts for months ( i.e. no activity within Corona Labs ) or blog posts with no comments on ( i.e. no activity within the community )
Sorry guys, this is all on me.
I get people asking me to post guest blog posts all the time (or hoping we will pay them for generic content), but those are almost always spam content that you don’t want. I really would like to have some guest posts from you the community, not someone with some spamish useless filler content.
I stopped From the Forums because we went like a month where the only things being asked in the forums were problems. There wasn’t any blog-worthy posts. However, over the past couple of months, that has changed and there have been some good discussion topics, and I really should resume the from the forum posts, but I got out of the habit and again, that’s on me.
I miss the days when developers were contributing to the blog.
Now I do have several featured apps/games that I could write up. I’ll make it my effort to get at least one of those published for you next week.
Rob