Yesterday, a major upgrade for Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color delivered a wider selection of Android applications to the popular e-reader tablet. And today, B&N’s Nook Developer program officially added Ansca Mobile’s Corona SDK to its short list of approved frameworks for Nook app development. The only other frameworks supported for the Nook Color are the official Android SDK from Google, PhoneGap, Mono for Android, UNITY: Android and Adobe AIR for Android.
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Why Did B&N Pick Corona? There’s a Story There…
Corona’s appeal to mobile app developers is that it allows for the reuse of code across platforms (iPad, iPad, Android, etc.). According to Barnes & Noble, the decision to support the Corona SDK was due to its demonstrated ease of use and speed with which it allows developers to create high-performance apps, and, we might add, especially mobile games.
However, there is more of a backstory to the selection process than was indicated by the press release. Ansca Mobile’s PR Manager Hetal Bhatt told us that there wasn’t any sort of “open call” or formal submission process for SDK makers to get theirs approved for use with the Nook Color. But B&N’s Chief Developer Evangelist Ted Patrick used to work at Adobe with Ansca Mobile’s two co-founders. The two co-founders, Walter Luh and Carlos M. Icaza, were the lead engineers on Flash mobile at Adobe, and left in 2007 to create Corona SDK after Adobe refused to overhaul Flash per their recommendations for the then-looming iPhone platform.
Afterwards, they created Corona SDK specifically for app development on mobile devices to fill the void left by Flash (too resource-hoggy, they said) and “official” languages like Objective-C for iOS (which they said was too complicated).
Since B&N’s Patrick knows the co-founders personally, he had been looking at the Corona SDK for some time and had even blogged about it in the recent past. When B&N was ready to open up to third-party mobile games and apps, Patrick test drove the SDK and tweeted his love for it. And that’s how the deal went down.
3 Apps Available at Launch
If that story is a little more “inside baseball” than you care for, then the only major takeaway from today’s news is this: the Corona SDK makes it easy to launch your apps on Nook. So easy, a 14-year-old can do it! In addition to its cross-platform capabilities, the SDK uses the Lua programming language to make the development process quicker, too.
At launch, there are three apps built using the Corona SDK on the Nook Color: Float, The Secret of Grisly Manor and Bloki.
Developers can learn more about the Corona SDK here: http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/nook/
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