Introducing CoronaCards!!!

06 March 2014

Introducing CoronaCards!!!

Over the last few years, it’s been great to see the Corona developer community grow worldwide. There are Corona developers literally everywhere! Of course, there are many others that are developing completely natively or using other tools. We know many of them would benefit from the power and ease-of-use of Corona, if only they could use it within their existing environments.

Well, that’s what CoronaCards is for! Think of CoronaCards as an “embeddable” or “overlay” version of the Corona platform. You can include it in any native app, in any configuration (full screen, partial screen, transparent overlay) and have it run rich, interactive Corona content. It can use almost all of our 1000+ APIs, from shader-based image filters, to physics, animation, audio and much more. It’s “Corona Everywhere”!

So what are some concrete uses of CoronaCards? Here are just a few:

• Developers using frameworks like Appcelerator or PhoneGap, with limited ability to add rich content, can use CoronaCards in their app to easily layer on cool interactive features.
• Developers (using any tool) that want to add a relatively complex feature like image filters (think of Instagram) can use CoronaCards and take advantage of our super-simple APIs to do this in just a few lines of code.
• Developers using a tool like Unity could use CoronaCards to quickly add and iterate on simple 2/2.5D aspects of their game UI.

In addition, we are working on some extremely cool applications of CoronaCards that we can’t say too much about yet. But here is a quick taste: imagine mobile advertising that can do everything Corona can do! Yes, it would blow away anything else in the market. The engagement and conversion rates are off the charts, and the data/analytics you can get are also very unique. We’re working on this with some partners and will have more to say soon!

One important thing to mention is that CoronaCards is built on the exact same foundation as Corona SDK and Corona Enterprise. So new features will make it into all our products and benefit all our developers. And CoronaCards takes full advantage of the maturity of a platform that is already powering well over 30,000 apps worldwide.

Finally, CoronaCards is available now for iOS and Android, and will be available for Windows Phone 8 soon. It can also be used within tools like Appcelerator, PhoneGap, Unity and Xamarin. We are currently in a closed beta – please check out the CoronaCards page and apply to get access!

If you have any “non-traditional” but cool ideas about how to use CoronaCards, please contact us: [email protected].