Corona is good, but Marmalade Quick is better, says CTO Closs

Jerry Howard | 23:45 - 17 May 2013

So far Corona has been great for me. I went from no experience with Corona or Lua to a completed/published app with ads and in-app purchases for both the Apple store and Google Play- all within 2 months. My app is "Birdy Brain" on both stores if you want to give it a whirl.

scame | 14:32 - 12 March 2013

Hello! Tim, what do you think about Quick perfomance? I just tried to run Collision Events example on Nexus 7. I created 15 objects and got many lags.

Walter Luh | 04:33 - 12 March 2013

Gosh, truthiness makes a comeback! That's what makes Corona so great. Even the few detractors we have are passionate and follow us off site. Great to see you here too, Rob!

Rob Lucifer | 16:57 - 11 March 2013

Well really Walter, I think the actual issue here is that Corona has been systematically shredded from what it was even a year ago.

Comparing it to back then, you see how much buggier it is, it crashes far more frequently, enterprise is being shoved down everyone's throats more than ever, premium support for bugs that shouldn't exist to begin with and staff just constantly trying to make everyone use the feature request form and gather votes despite the fact half of your staff have already publicly said that it is useless anyway as there is no commitment to implement what we most want from that list, unless it's easy.

You promised an official level editor and Mac apps, two things many people wanted and still do want, but this was bait and switch. We were told these things were coming soon and they never arrived.

Your recent name calling blog was also very disappointing. Seeing you insulting former staff members who have left gave me the impression you were bitter, which is a shame because there is already growing disdain for other executives at your company, such as your coo who takes to calling anyone who has a complaint a troll on twitter.

The forum is much quieter than it was even 6 months ago and the staff provide mostly useless answers or links to bug forms, feature forms, or enterprise.

It is sad to see a product I once enjoyed using become such a chore. For now I have to use Corona for work but my personal licence has lapsed and I can't imagine ever renewing it.

Tim Closs | 12:00 - 20 February 2013

Hi Walter

Great to get your input. By the way, we'll have to forgive the writers at PG their artistic license, as I never used the word "better", instead I was asked to draw objective comparisons between our two products.

It's true that many developers don't want to be messing with the internals of an engine. But the trouble with making a product a 'take it or leave it' proposition is that, if a developer likes 95% but can't get that last 5%, they still might need to choose another solution, even if that's just using the individual platform SDKs.

That's why from the start we architected Marmalade SDK as strictly layered, supporting open standards, and therefore embracing a world of additional open source modules and 3rd party extensions. We think that world should be open to all developers; some may explore it just a little, some may exploit it fully. Therefore we don't charge extra for that openness and ecosystem of extensions; even developers paying $149 for our Community license can target all iOS and Android devices and use any Marmalade extension or 3rd party service they choose.

I think the whole RAD space is really interesting, there's a lot of innovation happening. When designing Quick we looked at a large number of products and tools, and we were certainly very interested in some of the things Corona has done. I think we share some of the same DNA - whilst Marmalade has traditionally been known for C++, our goal has always been to simplify the complex. First and foremost that has been about simplifying platform fragmentation, and now we're also taking strides to simplify the development workflow.

Certainly iOS and Android are our core platforms - that's where we continue to invest most heavily. But ultimately we want to enable developers to make their own choices. We've found that savvy developers can find great opportunities on other platforms including BlackBerry, Windows Phone 8, and desktop Windows and Mac. For example, we recently ran a promotion with BlackBerry that had a phenomenal response for our community, and delivered over 1,000 apps and games to BlackBerry World.

We're looking forward to seeing how you guys develop your product, especially with the GameMinion acquisition. We'll be continuing to innovate with Marmalade Quick, and curating the OpenQuick project. I think between us we'll be offering some great choices for games and apps developers."

Cheers,
Tim

Jon Jordan | 13:52 - 18 February 2013

Thanks for the commetns Walter!

Walter Luh | 20:20 - 16 February 2013

Hey guys, Walter Luh, CEO of Corona Labs here. Thanks for the mention, and congrats to Tim/Marmalade on the launch of Quick. Its great that other folks are starting to see the value in the kinds of products we pioneered back in 2008.

We certainly agree that Lua is a great language. We believe developers of all levels want to build beautiful games/apps quickly and easily. This approach has been fully proven as Corona is now a very mature platform, with over 200k developers worldwide and over 25k live apps across all the app stores.

As for Tim's points about Corona and Marmalade, I'd like to respectfully make a couple of quick comments:

1) Open source: there is a lot of value in open source and we are big believers ourselves. However, we also have seen that the vast majority of developers want to focus their energy on building their apps/games, not mess with the internals of an engine. So that's why our devs tell us they love how Corona is actively maintained and that, for example, we delivered an update for iOS 6 the day it was released.

2) Underlying technologies: We agree - building on industry standards is important. That's why Corona SDK is also built on Box2D, SQLite, OpenAL and more. With Corona, we give developers access to the power of these technologies, but we also know how to make them extremely easy to use – it's in our DNA.

3) Platforms: We have purposely focused Corona on providing developers with the best way to build for iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook. These are where developers are making 99% of the money. As other platforms emerge, we will have no problems extending coverage. But I've personally seen what happened to Flash and it wasn't pretty ;)

Thanks again for the mention. All the best!