Making My Corona Plugins Paid

Jan31
2017 Leave a Comment Written by Jason

I’ve had Corona SDK plugins in the Corona Marketplace for nearly 2 years now, and in that time the plugins have been free. This is largely because at the onset of the Marketplace, Corona Labs did not support paid community plugins. That changed late last year, when they allowed developers to charge for plugins and other development assets, much like Unity does with its own marketplace (among others). This has been a real boon to the Marketplace, as the number and quality of plugins has increased significantly now that developers can earn real money for their efforts extending the platform. I’m personally a very happy customer of many of my fellow plugin developers.

While I will continue to provide community support free of charge via this site and the Corona Labs forums, I have decided to start charging what I think is a reasonable one-time fee for activating my Corona plugins. Writing plugins takes a significant investment of time and energy, as does supporting them with bugfixes and updates, and I believe it is important for developers to value their time.

If you had previously activated either plugin, you can continue to use it for free – your license to the plugin(s) remains valid. These new costs will only apply for new activations.

As of today, I offer two plugins: a Twitter plugin which will now cost $2.99 to activate, and a Stripe plugin, which will cost $4.99 to activate. I hope that new developers will continue to find them useful additions to their Corona toolkits, worth the cost. Look for new plugins (at reasonable rates) from me in the coming year.

Posted in Announcements

Stripe Plugin for Corona SDK

Feb22
2016 19 Comments Written by Jason

I created the Stripe plugin for Corona SDK to give Corona developers an easy way to accept online payments from inside their apps with as little as a single line of code.

This page contains the documentation for the plugin, as well as a sample project you can download and run to see the plugin in action for yourself. Please check back, as I will continue to update this page whenever bug fixes or new features are added. READ MORE »

Posted in Corona SDK Resources - Tagged bank, corona, credit card, payments, plugin, stripe

Twitter Plugin for Corona SDK

Jul15
2015 42 Comments Written by Jason

I created the Twitter plugin for Corona SDK to give Corona developers an easy way to access the full range of Twitter’s REST APIs from inside their apps, making it simple to get data from or post information to a Twitter user’s account with as little as a single line of code. The plugin automatically handles oAuth authentication, and persistently saves a logged-in user’s token data, so they’ll only need to log in and authorize your app once, even across multiple sessions, until they are manually logged out or revoke your app’s access to their Twitter account. The plugin also comes with a set of “convenience functions” that return Lua tables and/or Corona display objects, for easier access to common-use applications without the need for developers to wade through the raw JSON data that Twitter’s REST APIs return.

Posted in Corona SDK Resources - Tagged corona, plugin, twitter

Timer 2.0 Library for Corona SDK

Feb25
2015 20 Comments Written by Jason

I recently commented on a post on the Corona Labs forum from a developer who was having a hard time with timers that were not canceled when a scene was changed. Now the Corona SDK already gives us methods for pausing, resuming, or even canceling active timers, but those methods are somewhat restricted in that you can only cancel one timer at a time, and you must refer to the timer by it’s handle to do so. Under the current system, it’s very easy to accidentally leave a timer running when you would rather pause or cancel all your timers, or at least a number of them.

In my comment on that forum post, I suggested that the original poster vote up a Corona SDK feature request for the timer library to receive an update akin to the “Transition 2.0” update from a few years ago, so that we would have the ability to pause/resume/cancel all active timers at once, or to pause/resume/cancel a subset of active timers by tagging them. I still think that’s worth doing, and if you’re reading this, then you should definitely do that! However, part of what I love about Corona is how we developers can roll our own solutions to these sorts of problems while we wait for Corona Labs to add new features or fix bugs – so I decided to do just that and “fix” the timer library to enable those requested features. READ MORE »

Posted in Corona SDK Resources

Corona Finger Paint Module Revisited

Feb17
2015 3 Comments Written by Jason

Almost a year ago I posted a free module that allows Corona SDK developers to add a finger painting “canvas” to their Corona projects with just one line of code. It seems to have been useful for a number of developers, but in the months since releasing it, opportunities for improvement have presented themselves, and in particular I received one specific feature request that seemed worth addressing. So I dusted off that old module and made some tweaks that resulted in what I’m calling fingerPaint version 1.5.

What’s New In Version 1.5

I’ve updated the syntax for calling fingerPaint.newCanvas() so that you now pass a single table with specific key/value pairs into the function. This is partly because I find this to be a better way to organize function arguments, but also because it’s in-line with the syntax in my more popular progressRing module (as well as most official Corona SDK APIs). I’ve included backwards compatibility, however, so version 1.5 of the module will play nice with projects that use the older syntax.
I added a new “how to use this module” section at the top of fingerPaint.lua. That’s something I did for the progressRing module that folks seemed to like, so I’ll be doing that with all my publicly-shared modules moving forward.
I modified the module so that a paint stroke is only extended if the user’s finger has traveled far enough for it to make a visible difference. Previously, you could occasionally get an erratic line if the user “squiggled” their finger too closely around a single point.
I added the option to break up a stroke into individual line segments instead of using a single line object and appending new line points. By default this option is disabled, because it can lead to potentially crash-inducing memory usage if left unchecked, as it requires substantially more display objects to keep in system memory. But in certain controlled circumstances this option can be useful — for example, if you want the user to be able to erase only part of an existing paint stroke. I’ve also heard reports that on certain Android devices the default method of appending to a single line object can result in erratic behavior. In those cases, using segmented strokes seems to fix things. To enable this feature, simply add the key/value pair “segmented = true” to the table you pass into fingerPaint.newCanvas().

How To Use The Module

For more information about how the module works and it’s history, you can check out the original post from 2014 – I’m not going to recreate that information here. But below is a step-by-step guide for using the module to add a finger paint canvas to your app, with the updated syntax. This same information is also included in a commented-out section at the top of the module’s lua file. READ MORE »