Ok, so about a year ago, I got a wild hair to write a mobile app for a very specific reason. I’m going to gloss over that until it’s released…but just accept there were reasons.
I did a little research and found that Xamarin.Forms might be a good way to embrace multi-platform mobile programming…and jumped in both feet. That went really well until the summer of 2020, when I found out that I’d need to buy a VS license if I put my app on the various stores and either charged for it or hosted ads. Now, keep in mind, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about on a good day, so that might be wrong info to start with.
Regarding Ads or charging: I’m mixed on this. Again, I don’t know a lot about it yet, so I won’t say too much because it’s probably old or wrong info. But – I don’t actually want to host ads, AND I don’t want to charge people. It’s not that kind of app. I’m not trying to get rich, or even slightly more comfortable.
So, because I was also helping out with another project, and they chose CoronaSDK as their language, I started learning it. It had just gone open source and changed names to Solar2D, and is based heavily on Lua. Finding info has been extremely hard. Some things are on the CoronaLabs website, some are in the Solar2D forums. It’s also impossible to google anything related to Corona right now (due to the coronavirus pandemic, future time travelers).
Several things hit last year (pandemic, grief of losing several loved ones, massive health issues, work craziness), so I shelved the project for several months. I also, frankly, was stuck on a dead easy problem. My absolute frustration at being unable to easily find answers made is pretty easy to shove this to the back of the shelf, tbh.
Because of this, and kind of as a historical record of my progress, I decided to blog my adventures in learning Solar2D/CoronaSDK/Lua and getting the app out. I keep telling everyone I work with, if you have a question in a meeting, ask the question out loud. If you don’t know, it’s guaranteed that others in the room (virtual or otherwise) don’t know either and are too afraid to ask and appear dumb. Normalize admitting to not knowing.
So that’s it. That’s the blog post. Welcome to my journey.