Newsstand and Mobile Apps with Corona SDK Tutorials

After a small break from the Newsstand App development articles I want to tell you about a Corona SDK Tutorial I am taking, but first, a quick update on what i’ve been working on over the last few months in general.

Not much!

Well, that’s not really true… I’ve been working my nuts off but just not on App development. I’m making a concerted effort to try and put the consulting job to one side and concentrate on my online income. If you didn’t know, my day job is all to do with SAP technology and I’ve been trying to transition away from the 5 days per week at client sites (and hotels) to staying at home a hell of a lot more. AND… I’m starting to have a bit of success.

I’ve been working on a few online courses that I sell on my other website all to do with SAP training (which is pretty cool stuff, honest) and after a bit of online promotional work I’ve manage to pull in a regular monthly income from the course sales. Not enough to replace the consulting work… in fact far from it, but it is going in the right direction.

Hmmm, I’ll stop Waffling on

I enjoy teaching the SAP stuff but you’ve got to have a break from doing the same thing day in day out, so this is where my interest in App development crops up.

So to get back on topic. I want to tell you about what has been going on in my own little app development world. I’ve got tons of ideas and really enjoying screwing around with development technologies but I don’t know what I want to do first.

You see, the SAP courses I have produced could be turned into their own mobile apps. I can stick them on the IOS and Android market place and see what sales come, but I think they will be too pricey for mobile platforms. The race to bottom in mobile app pricing has already been run!

I’m really keen to get going with the magazine app development again too but i’m looking for the niche to produce it for. I have one mag app on the iTunes App store, but I can tell you, it’s takes a lot of work to produce a magazine on a monthly basis.

I would need to pick a niche that keeps my attention for a long time; just like with blogs, you have to give your subscribers new and interesting content on a regular basis. I could make a mix of all sorts of topics, a bit like nichespin.com. I’ll keep pondering this thought for now though.

So, what is floating my boat at the moment?

Answer: Corona SDK

I’ve been going through a Corona SDK tutorial course I purchased at Udemy all about game development with the Corona SDK. The course author, Jay Whye, does a fantastic job of showing how a newbie Corona developer (that’s me) can start with absolutely no experience and produce a bloody good game that can then be published to multiple app stores and platforms that Corona supports.

He goes through every single line of code in the game step by step resulting in an awesome tutorial. The videos are very well produced resulting in clear HD screencasts and you get to download all the game graphics and code that goes into building the app.

Corona SDK Tutorial

Corona SDK Tutorial

The course is called Beginning Mobile Game Development (aff. link) and if you are interested in learning game development this is an awesome place to start. The course will also give you a nice introduction to the Corona SDK plus Jay’s own unique development environment app called Outlaw.

Since playing around with the game code and Corona SDK itself I do have a few gripes. There is no standard development environment that Corona Labs supports (I mean, gives their approval) that include a built in debugger or up to date API reference. Everything you use to develop games has to be done using 3rd party tools. I fully understand that the team behind the Corona SDK are a small company and it takes people and money to produce this type of thing but it doesn’t stop me from asking for things like this 🙂

Another, more immediate gripe in my mind is that the Corona SDK does not currently support the Windows RT and mobile platform. I personally think they are missing out here. I totally understand they want to focus on the platforms that have a large user base and this makes sense. But I think most of the tech community write off Windows platform too easily. Lets face it, Microsoft dominate the desktop and enterprise. The Windows market place will grow and grow and will be the default place to buy software for PC’s. Once enterprises start building software for the Microsoft mobile platforms (which they will, i think), a cross platform development product such as Corona could easily work it’s way into large corporations and secure a larger customer base.

Hmm, may be it’s just because I have worked in large enterprises that I have this biased opinion.

Anyway, that doesn’t stop me digging into mobile app development. I’m loving Jay’s course and love how simple the Lua language is AND how easy the Corona SDK makes cross platform game development.

Oh, one last thing before signing off. Checkout the CoronaGeek podcast / google hangout show. It will give you a flavour of what the Corona SDK is all about and you get an insight into the Indie developer community.