CoronaCards Now Available

10 April 2014

CoronaCards Now Available


CoronaCards

CoronaCards logoWe are very excited to announce that CoronaCards is now available for general use. There is a 30 day trial so you can test it out, and CoronaCards for iOS is available for purchase today, with Android following soon (but also available for testing now).

CoronaCards represents a new chapter for Corona. Until now, anyone that chose Corona had to rely on it as a “complete stack”. In other words, if you chose to use Corona, by definition you did not choose another framework or a completely native app (e.g., Xcode/Objective-C). But CoronaCards changes that. No matter what underlying platform developers choose, they can now take advantage of Corona and its strengths:

  • Richness – Corona gives you access to the full power of the device and lets you build anything you can imagine in 2D and 2.5D.
  • Speed and ease-of-use – With Corona you really do build 10x faster. For instance: one line of code is all you need for OpenGL-accelerated graphics, physics or shader-based filters.
  • Cross-platform – Of course, any content that you develop for Corona (or CoronaCards) will work equally well across all the platforms we support.

CoronaCards is also an excellent choice to add interactivity and richness to existing apps made in frameworks like Appcelerator or PhoneGap. We even have developers using it to add 2D overlays to Unity-based games, thereby taking advantage of the speed of development and quick iteration in Corona. We have docs and sample projects for all of these platforms.

This is just the beginning of course and we fully expect to hear many other great uses for CoronaCards in the coming months. Best of all, Corona SDK, Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards all share the same core. As we add features to Corona, all platforms benefit at the same time.

Now, there has been some confusion as to the role of CoronaCards vs. Corona SDK. Here is a quick rundown of 2 key questions:

If you are a Corona SDK developer today, do you need CoronaCards?
Probably not. You are already taking advantage of everything Corona has to offer. CoronaCards is meant for developers that are building in other environments or that have existing non-Corona apps and games.

Is CoronaCards the only way to (soon) build for HTML5?
No. There will be a CoronaCards for HTML5, but Corona SDK developers will also get a way to build for HTML5 inside the Corona Simulator.

We answer these and other questions in the CoronaCards FAQs, so take a quick look. And if you think you can use the richness of Corona in your non-Corona projects, give it a spin!

Feel free to ask any questions and give us feedback in our forum. Thanks!

david
14 Comments
  • Chris
    Posted at 08:25h, 10 April

    Is that $499 per version per year?

    • David
      Posted at 09:21h, 10 April

      Yes, that’s correct.

  • Frouboy
    Posted at 09:35h, 10 April

    $499/platform/developer/year……ridiculous price.

  • rarmstrong5
    Posted at 09:50h, 10 April

    Seems pretty steep but it actually turns out cheaper than using Enterprise (e.g., implementing CoronaCards into the iOS environment with full access to both SDKs turns out way cheaper than Enterprise if you were just developing for iOS…). Interesting

  • David Grant
    Posted at 10:59h, 10 April

    I agree with the ridiculous pricing scheme. 2k for all platforms plus 1k a year for corona enterprise. 3k a year is rough but I guess you have to pay to play.

    • David
      Posted at 11:32h, 10 April

      David – it’s unlikely you would need both CoronaCards and Corona Enterprise. The FAQs have a question precisely about that.

      • David Grant
        Posted at 15:21h, 10 April

        Yeah after I posted that I thought about that. I’m assuming I would still need a corona SDK license though. So that would bring it down to 2,600ish give or take.

        • David
          Posted at 15:24h, 10 April

          I’m not exactly sure what you have in mind… but if you are using CoronaCards then you don’t really need a Corona SDK/Enterprise license. Unless you are building both a “traditional” Corona app and also building Corona into a non-Corona app.

  • WyldKard
    Posted at 13:58h, 10 April

    So Corona Pro is about $100 more expensive than CoronaCards. You get access to all platforms, but you don’t get access to native libraries. For single-platform developers, it seems there should be a cheaper version of Enterprise available. Or is the official answer for them to just use CoronaCards and deal with XCode (or alternative) as a container?

    As far as functionality goes, is there something you can do with CoronaSDK that you can’t do with CoronaCards for the price difference,as far as implementing functionality in Lua is concerned?

    • David
      Posted at 15:04h, 10 April

      WyldKard – your question re: functionality was answered in the forum here:
      http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/46686-what-cant-you-do-with-coronacards/
      Short answer: CoronaCards does not implement things that make more sense to do in the “host app” (e.g., push notifications).

      As for pricing and how things compare between Corona SDK, Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards, a couple of things:
      1) As stated in the FAQ, the users and use cases are different. So it is pretty hard to do an apples to apples comparison
      2) Having said that, the prices are actually fairly comparable when you take into account platform coverage and extensibility. If anything, Corona SDK and Corona Enterprise are on the more affordable size. But again, let me emphasize that the use cases are quite different. CoronaCards is, for the most part, not for existing Corona developers.

      • WyldKard
        Posted at 17:26h, 10 April

        Thanks for the response, David. Can you explain what you mean by prices being fairly comparable when considering extensibility? I see the benefit of Corona SDK when considering platform coverage, but that’s not important for those like me who are chiefly only interested in one platform.

        I’ve only skimmed the CoronaCards docs, but it _appears_ that CoronaCards is relatively easy to set up. After this routine setup, writing the actual Lua code seems pretty comparable under CoronaCards from Corona SDK.

        That said, CoronaCards is a $500 purchase that still works after a year, though a re-subscription is necessary to get the latest version. Plus, it gives you access to native libraries. Corona Pro is $600 but _requires_ a re-subscription to keep using it after a year. Enterprise is an additional $360 for access to native libraries. How is that a comparable price with CoronaCards?

        So if a single-platform developer wants native library access, it seems Enterprise is almost twice as expensive as CoronaCards. What am I missing here? Is using CoronaCards a lot more complicated than I think it is for it to be so much cheaper than Enterprise?

        I agree that use cases complicate making comparisons, and that perhaps my use case as a single-platform developer puts me in the minority. However, it’s not really clear to me from the brief FAQ comments why someone wouldn’t switch (or start with) CoronaCards instead of using Pro/Enterprise. Again, maybe the setup for CoronaCards is not as easy as it seems?

        • David
          Posted at 17:37h, 10 April

          If you are a single-platform developer and don’t mind dealing with the native side of things for the “shell” of your app, then you should by all means use CoronaCards. That would definitely be the way to go. You would effectively get Corona Enterprise-level functionality, at half the price. But keep in mind that it is harder to do certain things. And you will have to do some extra work to wire up push notifications, IAPs, etc, whereas Corona makes those things easy.

          I do think most developers nowadays want to do iOS and Android, and in that situation it’s more of a toss-up cost-wise. And when you factor that Corona does make things easier than native (see all the complaints from Corona developers when they try to use Corona Enterprise :), then it’s not as clear cut.

          But I would encourage you to try out the CoronaCards trial. You might find that that is the best way for you.

          • WyldKard
            Posted at 14:09h, 11 April

            I’ll give it a look, David. Out of curiosity, do you guys have stats on how many developers are actually targeting multiple platforms versus only shipping for one platform? Would this be information you guys are willing to divulge?

  • Joe
    Posted at 17:23h, 10 April

    Why should a Corona SDK developer use CoronaCard? I prefer you spend more time in improving Corona SDK!