I want create application for Android and iOS (phones and tablets). I would like use some cross platform framework for acceleration developing process. So I ask for some recommendation.
It will be small or medium application. It will use tandard wigets like text input, check box, radio button, list box. It would be great have input with autofocus or contextual searching.
My requirements are for framework:
working on phone and tablets
easy to start / install (very important)
easy to deploy (very important)
include library for working with images
include library for working with fonts (TrueType)
learn something perspective for future
be able pack with my application some images
i am able pay some money for comfort
I had asked google before i wrote this question. I found few frameworks but i have dubieties about all of them :).
Answer for cross plafrom framewrok are:
Flutter
It is young. And is it perspective flutter & Dart?
Sencha
Is it easy for start and deploy?
PhoneGap
Qt
It is C++. How fast is it for developing?
Kivy
I read their description. I checked their documentation. But I would like know opinion of people who worked with it.
Thank you.
Man, You have two major options.
Xamarin.native
If your application is supporting a high (pixel perfect) graphic
content then go for Xamarin.Native
All your requirement will be covered by this.
You can share 80% of your code along all the platforms.
Only UI related stuff is written differently for each platform.
Everything else is shared, You can go for PCL solution
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/application_fundamentals/pcl/
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/getting_started/
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/
Xamarin.Forms
If your application is not very rich in UI.
If your application is more of form based
Go for Xamarin.Forms
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/getting-started/
Related
I want to develop application in android and iOS both.
But i am confuse between native development and development using react and node.js etc.
Please help me to choose (If possible specify reason).
P.S Here cost is not an issue.
If you need high performance and attractive UI and don't want to be blocked by some functionalities that may not br provided by cross platform, I recommend you to use native platform. But if your app doesn't need to be very attractive and doesn't need too much processing, then you can use cross-platform. Actually for many features you need to add plugins if you are building cross platform app and adding number of plugins makes your application slower.
OK, well there isn't much data to go on, but there are several options if you want to write cross platform apps.
There is:
Sencha Touch - HTML and JavaScript
PhoneGap - HTML, JavaScript and CSS
QT - C++ and QML
Appmethod - C++ and Object Pascal
Xamarin - C#
Visual Studio - looks like you can do C# or C++, or Unity for games.
and probably a lot more...
Why would you choose one of these instead of writing in the native language for the platform?
Well, the pros seem to outweigh the cons. If you are targeting several platforms, I would choose one of the options above, simply because you only have to write everything once. If you did it native for each platform, you would write everything twice or maybe three or even four times. Using one of the above tools will be much easier and save you time, and they might be just as seamless and workable as native development.
To simply answer your question, If you would like to be able to write your app once, and be able to manage all future updates by managing only one code base, do cross platform using one of the above tools. The only downside is that you might have to learn a new language (but with a place like Stack Overflow, learning new languages is pretty awesome). It will save you time in the long run.
My work consists of porting an iPad application to Android (so from Objective-C to Java). I've developed in the Android environment, but never in iOS. Currently I am looking for advice -- I'd like to know if is there a way, method, or process which can help me to do this more easily.
At this stage generally the answer is no, but I've got some suggestions that might help.
Use UIWebView/Webkit extensively - baring any HTML5 media (and SVG), there's little porting required when you render HTML. What you render in one, generally, renders well on the other.
If your iOS app is a basic show-this-edit-that style of app, you may find PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile, Titanium or the new Adobe suite a better time investment.
Because Android lacks a consistent device base, which makes developing animation-rich UIs difficult, you might find that there is no 1-1 UI comparison. Instead think about the features you offer, and their underlying data and view models.
You should be able to create a similar UIViewController/Activities structure although the tying logic behind the scenes will be platform specific. Map this out on some paper - it makes a really good what-the-hell-do-i-do-next plan for your UI skeleton.
Prefer an intermediate abstraction between your 'in data' and 'out data' so you can exchange parsers/kits/apis/frameworks without hacking everything to bits.
Where you have custom draw routines and graphics, ensure that you've got filler gradients or colours. Android uses a box model to support the many many screen sizes - iOS only has 4 resolutions to worry about. Recreating the same look might take too much time - contrasting pastel colours are a good placeholder until you can justify making the artwork.
There's not a lot more that can say that hasn't already been said before.
Hope this helps!
Few advices:
You will in most cases need to do redesign of UI as iPad, being tablet PC and having a larger screen as compared with most Android devices. Advice: Check if there is a version of the application dedicated for iPhone as it could be very helpful during redesign stage.
Check if iPad code contains beside Objective-C code also C/C++ code. If there is significant amount of code you might consider using Android NDK which allows C/C++ code to be used together with Java.
If the iPad application was using one of the popular cross platform frameworks (e.g. PhoneGap) that are based on HTML5/CSS/JavaScript combination you might be able to reuse most of the code. Both iPad and Android browser/ui elements responsible for rendering HTML5 are based on same engine (WebKit) and generally generate similar experience. Note: Some frameworks allow custom access to native functionalities which will require rewrite in almost all cases.
Do not try to create exact same UI on Android if it conflicts with user interface guidelines. As you probably know the guidelines are available at: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html
Android users are used to certain interface and they should be getting similar experience as other apps available for Android. Also it might be more than painful to create similar controls for Android that exist on iPad. If there is pressure to make same "look and feel" here is a post that explains how to defend from such pressures: Porting iPhone applications to Android? How to convince them NOT to
Numerous features existing on iPad will not be available on Android (e.g. Android application splash screen using just an image). So analyse the iPad application and decompose it to set of functionalities. Once you have them then you can map them to Android API and start coding.
There are no Objective-C to Java converters at the moment (this might change in the future) but for general feeling what are differences between Objective-C and Java you might want to read "Porting Objective-C to Java" by Theresa Ray of Tensor Information Systems Inc
As the topic states - is there any technology that would let me write code for a simple commercial 2D game which could be then compiled to work well on Android, iOS and Web browsers or at least two of them (e.g. Android and iOS)? There is so much buzz about cross-platform nowadays that I was wondering if I'm missing something.
My goal (set by my producer) is to make this game for all of these three platforms, and so far I planned to use:
- Web browsers: Adobe Flex,
- Android phones: Java (since my favourite C++ is recommended only for short snippets),
- iPad/iPhone/iPod: Objective-C (are there any alternatives?).
It pretty much means re-writing the same source code three times. Is there any way to speed it up by using a technology that would work on at least both of them?
However, I don't want to use Adobe Flex for all three (though it's possible), because it requires Adobe AIR (works only with Android 2.2 and higher) and not a lot of phones have it (it's totally different with browsers where 98% of people have Flash).
I don't mind adding some platform-specific code for each version, of course.
Also, if you have any suggestions about choosing a fancier technology for any of the platforms (maybe some nice frameworks?), I'd really appreciate that, too.
Take a look at Corona and Moai both are Lua-based frameworks for game development targeting multiple platforms.
I would like to say that Multimedia Fusion was capable of doing this, but it isn't quite ready yet. There are currently a number of runtime exporters for the product which allow you to export your game to multiple target platforms which include flash, java and iOS at the moment. XNA and Android exporters are currently in the works. I should probably mention that I am only affiliated with these guys as a happy consumer of their products. It is probably worth checking it out even if they can't do everything you want yet. If it's not suitable for your needs it is still a very good choice if you wish to rapidly prototype your application.
See:
http://www.clickteam.com
On a side note, personally I would recommend against going down the js+html5 route, particularly if you are targeting mobiles. I should probably stress that it's simply an opinion I have and that there are plenty of people here who will disagree with me. In all javascript games I have played, I have felt the garbage collector. The issue is that without control over garbage collection it is free to run when it feels like, causing infrequent but very obvious pauses in the middle of your game. You can work around this but I don't see why it should be that difficult. I can definitely align with the ideals of being able to write the thing once and run it on all platforms, but I can't see it working just yet.
To offer some advice assuming you find no suitable tools for the job, your aim is to maximise reusability. This means all of your games resources and levels should be well defined as independent resources. For non-critical logic you can make use of embeddable scripting languages such as Lua, which will maximise your code reuse. C (or C++) code will also be reusable on a lot of platforms, and might be a good choice if you are familiar and confident with the language.
I'm personally using Phonegap and Zepto.js. But you may have more luck with jQuery mobile. Phonegap is nice because its website will compile the apps for you.
1) If you write your game in C++ you can use it for iPhone & Android (NDK) as well. Preferably, you write your game engine in C++, than you can use a OS specific layer for UI stuff..
2) Implement your game in HTML & Javascript. iPhone/Android users will have to use a webbrowser to play your game. For iPhone, you can even create a launcher, that looks like an app, but actually is a webview with HTML & Javascript
Unity3D should be able to do this for you, if you purchase some extra sprite addins to handle 2D (like Ex2D or SM2 or Toolkit 2D). Also right now until Apr 8, the iOS and Android license is free.
Game Maker Studio. It has a package that let's you deploy on all of the platforms you outlined.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio
I am trying to get my iPhone App on Android platform as well. I was wondering if there is anyway I can directly port my iPhone App or Code to Android? Do I need to write whole App from the scratch for Android platform or is there anyway I can reduce my work? Thanks.
To the best of my knowledge there is no way to port apps between platforms, and there is no reason you would ever want to. Android and iPhone are two wildly varying platforms both with unique interfaces, api layers, design guidelines and all sorts. Where you would use a navigation bar in iPhone (for instance) with a logo/title in the centre, a back button on the left and other buttons on the right, you would use an action bar in Android with a logo/title on the left hand side and action buttons on the right, possibly with a drop down for extra buttons.
Obviously there are some concepts which are "shared", such as tabbed browsing (although this is being overtaken in android by the dashboard concept and other ways of navigating) you should never port between these two platforms. You should always start from scratch.
Same goes for cross platform frameworks... there is so much that's different and unique about the two platforms that you'd be writing so much platform specific code it wouldn't be worth trying to maintain just one code base.
I believe their isn't a program that ports it for you.
Android is written in Java, however, they also developed an NDK, that is based on C++.
So if you already wrote for the Iphone, then porting it to android with C++ (NDK) is probably easier for you then write it in Java.
You can use 3rd party tools to create apps that work in both. That's what Titanium and PhoneGap were aiming at. With the new changes to the SDK Agreement, those look like they're not really "legal" or at least violate the agreement.
However I am not 100% sure.
I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this question so if it isn't please let me know and I will move it. I am looking to create a game for both Android and iPhone platform. I know Unity is a great game engine and my question is how well does it work for creating one code base to build for both Android and iPhone platforms? Time is a constraint on this project so I am very interested in how smoothly the process usually is when trying to build both applications and how much custom code must be written for each specific application. Any insite that people have on this topic would be much appreciated thanks.
Unity, as implied by it's very name, is designed explicitly to facilitate such multi-platform development in little time. You can for example define for each platform what the max size of each texture is, and it will automatically resize them for you when you build for that target platform - the build process really simple too. Since both your platforms are touch devices, it should be easy to have just one code base working seamlessly for both platforms (and more if needed), with very few custom code for each platform.
Unity has a no-questions-asked 30 day trial of the Android and (I think) iOS versions - I encourage you to try them and see for yourself how little time it will take you to have a proof of concept build for both platforms.