Corona Geek On Air – Episode 17 – Hanging with Alex Souza, Founder of Kwiksher

03 December 2012

Corona Geek On Air – Episode 17 – Hanging with Alex Souza, Founder of Kwiksher


Corona Geek, Google+ Hangouts

Corona Geek On Air episode 17 is ready for your comments!

During this week’s live Corona Geek On Air Hangout we were joined by special guest Alex Souza, Creator of Kwik, a Photoshop plugin for creating mobile apps without code. During the hangout we announced this week’s Corona Labs t-shirt winner, recapped last Saturday’s Big Corona Meetup, discussed Corona Lab’s new team additions and talked about why sweeping changes in your user interface might cause problems for your app.

As always, be sure to join us next Monday at 2pm CST for a new episode and add us to your Google+ Corona SDK circle.

Thanks for watching,

Charles McKeever
CoronaGeek

Show Geeks:

If you are new to the conversation, the Corona SDK is a cross platform mobile development tool kit that makes it easy for developers to create native applications for Android and iOS devices as well as for Kindle, and Nook.

Show Notes – 12/03/2012

Announcements

  • Win a Corona T-Shirt! – Corona Labs has generously volunteered to supply Corona t-shirts for giveaways to the Corona Geek community. To be eligible to win, follow Corona Geek on either Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or YouTube, then complete the giveaway entry form for a chance to win. Congratulations to Brad Marcus, who won this week’s contest.
  • Big Corona Meetup – last Saturday’s Big Corona Meetup was recordedand is available for replay on YouTube. If you couldn’t attend the 6 hour hangout with us live, don’t worry. We missed you, but you didn’t miss the event. There is a part 1 and part 2, so be sure to catch both. Google+ Hangouts limited recording to around 3 to 3.5 hours, so we had to split the event in two. The audio and video quality is excellent, so thanks to the Google / YouTube team for providing such a great tool for group meetings.

Lastest Build Release Notes
http://developer.coronalabs.com/corona-daily-builds/summary

  • New Public Release – Corona Labs has published a new public release, which means that the new widgets, Android enhancements, iPhone 5 updates, game center fixes, and other bug fixes are now available to anyone who wants to develop using the Corona SDK. Corona Labs has resumed daily builds, so be sure to check out the release notes for recent bug fixes.

Corona Blog highlights

  • The Corona Labs family is expanding – During the Big Corona Meetup we had a great chat with Walter Luh and he shared the awesome news that Corona Labs has recently hired new team members. Read all about the new engineers and developer relations additions on the Corona Labs blog and congratulations to Rob Miracle for joining the Corona Labs family. Rob is a great resource in the community, so we are glad to see him join the team.

Developer Spotlight

  • Hanging with Alex Souza, Creator of Kwik – This week we hung out with Alex Souza, Creator of Kwik, a Photoshop plugin for creating mobile apps without code. Alex gave us a great overview of how both non-coders and full on developers are using Kwik to speed up their development using Photoshop and Corona SDK, without writing code. My take away was that even as a coder I can use Kwik to speed up my iterative development process. Corona SDK makes iterative development possible, and Kwik makes the visual portion of that process just as simple. I’m very visual and I like the idea of being able to arrange objects in my scene and then have the code for them created for me using a visual tool. Alex also highlighted the fact that Kwik allows for multi-lingual support as well as the In-app purchase process. As he says, he originally created Kwik as a way for him to be lazy, but now Kwik is his full time employment, so I guess we can just how successful the tool has become. I’d like to thank Alex for hanging out with us. Be sure to check out his website at Kwiksher.com where you can find all the details about Kwik along with videos and tutorials how to create mobile apps using Photoshop and Corona SDK without code.

App Review

  • This week I recommended Calendars by Readdle as a way to manage Google Calendars and Tasks. It’s a well designed app and keeps me connected to my calendar even when I’m offline.

Device / Industry News

  • Big UI Changes Can Mean Unhappy Customers – an app I love and have used on a daily basis for several years has recently made drastic changes to their user interface. The change was so major that it set me off to look for alternative apps. That’s why I can recommend Readdle’s Calendar app because, that app has become my replacement app. I purchased the original task app and have used it and it’s companion online service for several years now, but their new UI is so bad that I switched to using tasks in Google Calendar and Readdle’s Calendar 3 app to manage both my Google Calendar and my tasks. That means that I will be canceling my annual subscription with my beloved task management service. The fee is only $15 a year, but you can see how pushing out drastic UI changes without consulting your user base can indirectly impact your app business. It’s something we should all keep in mind. Calendars 3 is a universal app, so I can use it on my iPhone or iPad. I’ll do a full review soon and let you know how it all works out.
That’s it for this week.
Next Week
  • On the next weekly Corona Geek On Air Hangout we’ll be joined by Ryley Newsh, a young entrepreneur and app developer. Ryley is 15 years old and has chosen the Corona SDK to build his mobile apps. Ryley will be sharing his developer story with you and why he chose Corona to be his mobile development tool of choice. So be sure to tune in for episode 18 of Corona Geek.
If you have thoughts on this topic that you’d like to share, post them in the comments below. We’d love to hear how you handle data storage in your app.

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LET’S CONNECT!

Charles McKeever
[email protected]

Charles McKeever is a life long computer geek who enjoys exploring technologies to understand how they work, how they can be smashed together, and how they can be used to fuel entrepreneurial endeavors.

7 Comments
  • charlesmckeever
    Posted at 21:04h, 03 December

    I’m a big fan of tools that speed up my development time. Kwik sounds like the kind of tool that can make things faster for sure. I might have to add it to my work flow.

  • Alex Souza
    Posted at 16:43h, 05 December

    Gang, thanks for the opportunity. I loved to be in the show!

  • Toff
    Posted at 16:57h, 05 December

    The part about Kwik I enjoyed was that even though the code is done for you, you can still add your own extra code if you want to.

  • Jorge Sanchez
    Posted at 01:44h, 07 December

    Great episode. Kwik is indeed a great tool. Used it for my latest interactive book app. Keep ’em coming! Btw, I ran into the “tap” “touch” event listener “feature” as well. My fix was to change tap to touch and check for event.phase == “began”, and ignore “ended” in the callback function. Worked a treat.

  • Alex Souza
    Posted at 18:30h, 07 December

    Jorge, let me know about your Kwik made storybook. You should showcase it.

  • Charles McKeever
    Posted at 19:51h, 07 December

    Thanks Jorge. Definitely send me details about your storybook as well. I’d be interested in hearing your story. Did you see Christopher Ward’s recent post on the Touch vs Tap event issue? http://coronageek.com/1162/handling-corona-sdk-tap-events-vs-touch-events/

  • Jorge Sanchez
    Posted at 02:36h, 08 December

    Charles, I read the post, and I actually think it *is* an elegant solution. I’ve done worse, much worse 🙂 I’d love to get in touch with further details on the book.
    Alex,
    Definitely planning to showcase. We submitted the app Wednesday for iOS and am in the process of submitting to Amazon, just adding final touches. I’ll tweet you the details

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