Thanks for calling it what it is! You’re spot on.
Hey guys - a quick question: what exactly wasn’t clear about Walter’s earlier post on this very thread?
We stated that Corona may not be the best solution for a pure, cookie-cutter UI business app. We’d love to say that Corona is the best for everything, but that’s not realistic. But we did say that:
-
Corona is great for custom UIs
-
Corons is great if you need to go cross-platform
-
Via CoronaCards we support a ton of scenarios and still make many things easier
-
Via Corona Enterprise anyone can add any additional functionality
So I think we have a pretty clear position on this.
Do we support everything everyone wants? Unfortunately no. But no other platform does either. And if you go native, you sacrifice ease of development and cross-platform. Unfortunately there are always tradeoffs.
Rest assured though that it is our intention to make Corona better all the time.
For me, nothing left unclear and for that I’m thankful. This clarity and declaration is 3 years too late though. All these years we’ve been promised something that was apparently never meant to be. That is perhaps why there is some degree of resentment at least on my part.
By the way, here is a great example of a business app made with Corona (with a custom UI):
It just launched earlier today and on both Android and iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/menume/id700326215
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.menu.eater
And there are a few others. A member of the community is working on a really great looking news app, also with a cool custom UI.
That is very nice, just been trying it on my iPad.
Was this done just in Corona or Corona Cards ?
Would love more information about how the app was developed.
Dave
I don’t have a ton of info. I’ll see if the developer is willing to give people some info. I believe it is straight up Corona SDK Pro (not Enterprise).
Pretty cool!
I took a look at the app posted by David, to see how they are dealing with some of the common problems that people complain about.
On the Signup page, there are 4 text fields. On 1 of my Android devices (LG smartphone running Android 4.4.2) the text is not centered in the box. On another Android device (Nexus 7) the text is centered.
I have little doubt that the developers wrote the code with the expectation that the results would look the same on all devices. Is this the same problem that has been reported and discussed in these forums many times? If yes, this is why people are complaining and saying Corona is not good for business apps. CoronaLabs has provided a solution that mostly works, but we need solutions that always work.
Text entry is one of many challenges we all face. Indeed the app looks gorgeous and this is a testament to its designer’s talent as well as Corona SDK’s rich graphical capabilities but beauty only goes skin deep I’m afraid.
For me, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, the API consistency is one of the key issues. A few posts up, David says “- Corons is great if you need to go cross-platform”… Yeah right, if only this a factual statement…
Following are few API inconsistencies off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others (please chime in…)
- Lack of address book support on Android
- Camera API
- display.newText performance issues on WP8 causing devs to use bitmap fonts
- No map support on WP8
- webView differences
- Orientation support issues
Because of these and other various challenges, I am not able to deliver consistent experience across the platforms using Corona SDK. So the cross platform development at 10 times the speed promise only go so far. Once you find yourself using a feature not supported on another platform you’re stuck with compromises and delays…
An equivalent Android Contact List plugin that was “coming soon” over a year ago is long overdue.
Access to Contact Notes would be a nice addition to the current pluggin.
An iOS & Android plugin that returns a complete table of the Contact List is much needed for obvious reasons.
Calendar iOS and Android plugin would come in handy.
Text attachments would be nice.
Users are expecting their purchased apps to work seamlessly with their native apps. Contact List and Calendar are probably 2 of the most used native apps and these need to be interfaced seamlessly by 3rd party apps.
I’m mailing this “wish list” to the big guy at the North Pole.
Nail
So I have decided to just open source all my plugins for all the app logic I have built because there really is some pretty cool stuff that you can do for business apps using corona 
You can follow the post here.
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/54564-new-plugin-suite/
Most of my plugins should be up to github in a few days, if you need something that I don’t have just say so as I might not have it only because I don’t use that type of logic.
Web designers will love the modules as they use percents on width/height/top/left etc.
While I could have built this about 10x faster in HTML5 or native code, I really was just wanting to A: be lazy and B: see if it could be done in corona… (and yes I know not my best work but was in a hurry lol)
Dashboard::
Inbox::
Calendar::
christopher, this is awesome!
Pretty cool!
Started a new topic for the github location.
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/55970-corona-business-uiux-framework/
So I have decided to just open source all my plugins for all the app logic I have built because there really is some pretty cool stuff that you can do for business apps using corona
You can follow the post here.
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/54564-new-plugin-suite/
Most of my plugins should be up to github in a few days, if you need something that I don’t have just say so as I might not have it only because I don’t use that type of logic.
Web designers will love the modules as they use percents on width/height/top/left etc.
Started a new topic for the github location.
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/55970-corona-business-uiux-framework/