I have an iOS app that I want to convert to Android, it mostly uses UITableView, and other basic UI Objects, but other than that nothing fancy.
There are several tools out there that claim it can translate iOS to Android automatically.
I personally tried Apportable, StellaSDK, and also Intel App-Porter, but I didnt get any of them to work, even if I tried it with the simplest possible "hello world" iOS app using XIB.
Has anybody ever tried these or any other tool, that converts iOS apps to Android successfully for any non-game iOS app?
Thanks
rough
As of January 2014:
In any case it's never "automatic", there is always some amount of work involved, as these porting kits always lag behind Apple and their implementations are incomplete.
Apportable: promising, but despite what their web site is saying it's not quite there yet, still under development (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/apportable-discuss)
Right now trying StellaSDK with no luck: samples don't work or don't compile and there is virtually no information on the 'Net, even here on SO. The only thing these sample apps seem to be able to do is to ping home (morningtec.cn) when you run them, and I don't think you can disable this easily.
App Porter: never tried but I don't believe auto-translating ObjC to HTML5 is such a great idea on many levels.
Yeah, the picture is grim.
Related
I am thinking of developing a program within ASP.NET. But that I could port easily to Apple, Android and Windows phones and tablets. I also want the program to be able to run on PCs (MAC´s?).
This seems to be fine. However, the normal GUI of Windows does not look at all like the GUI from e.g. iOS or Android. And this would be a big show stopper. It should be at least optimized for touch mode. So all on screen widgets should be a bit bigger.
Are there libraries, providing controls, which looks like normal ones on the operating system? It would be best if this works kind of automatically. So the program should find out where it runs and load the standard GUI best fitting to the device, where it is being started.
I could of course develop own controls, but this may be a bit too much of effort.
It would also be very nice if the library would handle different screens or modes like portrait and landscape. So that it may switch depending on the orientation of the tablet, or phone for instance.
I am searching for something like that, which provides a good result, without the programmer needing too much to do by himself.
I also like if one can recommend a library he is using already by a bigger program. From my own experience, you get to know the strengh and weakness of such libraries with the time passing by.
Best Regards.
I already discovered some tools like PhoneGap, Sencha, Mono. I do not know, if these are well suited for me.
I like to create an app most likely for all plattforms at the same time. Is this the case with e.g. PhoneGap?
I am not familar with JavaScript, or CSS or HTML development.
I am an experienced C# programmer and I am quite familar with Java. So VisualStudio is my daily working environment, and I am using Eclipse also a lot.
Mono:
I only read about it and found out this aspects:
cost 999$ to use it in Visual Studio. Hope that this price includes development for all plattforms and not just one. Did not yet check this.
The coding looks very good.
There are APIs for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone to setup controls. So these parts needs to be rewritten for any supported application. One may create a core library, which can be used for all components. This aspect is not so nice.
However, I would prefer a solution, where the GUI is even described on another level. And then it should be brought to the current plattform automatically, if not specific libraries are used. So HTML5 may be more flexible.
Best Regards,
Patrick
I am new to android platform and have to do by B Tech project on this. I have to do product recognition and then process them. So, I need to do some serious coding on implementation of Image Processing on Android platform.
For this, I would require :-
Through understanding of Android programming
Setting up the environment for image processing on Android.
Finally, an emulator to debug my codes
So, I need suggestions for all of the above, like, what book I should go through for learning Android , what emulators I should use and can I use openCV libraries in my android application.
Regrading emulators, I have heard, that they are pretty slow and have lots of bugs. They keep on hanging. So, should I have an Android mobile then ?
Please comment, if, you are unclear about my question.
PS: I posted the same question here, but got no replies. So, posted it again.
Thanks !!
There are a lot of books out there, CommonsWare is a pretty good place to start for the basics, he has office hours (where you can ask questions) and comments on here quite a lot.
There is only one emulator as far as I know, most people use eclipse for their environment and it's fairly well integrated with the android tool set, but there are a few others, as well as command line tools if your prefer those everything you need for android development is here other than eclipse which is here
In regards to image processing I assume you mean image matching and yes there is an openCV for android there are also some commercial offerings if you don't want to try and sort through openCV
If you are going to be using a camera to do image matching then the emulator is not a great choice unless you want to be restricted to using it with a webcam (which is a pain to get working) you will still work a lot with the emulator though.
I have been looking at the different packages for python on android and IOS as i am going to be upgrading my phone soon.
However, i dont know which OS to go with. For android they have the SL4A package, but for IOS they have their equivilent. However, im stuck on which to go for. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?
I know its kind of a stupid question, however im just getting into mobile development since they allowed scripting languages on the mobile platform.
The python support for Android is pretty good, but still under development. You can do things that a scripting language can but not the stuff that Python as a OO language can.
Example:- When you go through the api reference here, you can see that one can write scripts to do basic to complex tasks, but, in a restrictive way. You can never build full blown apps, and even if you do, it will always be slow because the SLA4 is just another layer on top of few other layers in the Android hierarchy. There have been a lot of fun stuff that has been done using Python scripting, example: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/nexus-one-phone-rides-a-rocket-up-28000-feet/#ixzz0v7LFT7ay (A bit over-board and crazy, but awesome nonetheless.)
I don't have much experience on an IPhone to pass on such comments. But, an IPhone is expensive. You can always get a used Nexus phone and do all kinds of Python hacking/scripting. All depends on your budget and your need.
That is all.
I had been on the lookut for Python on iOS for sometime. About 2-months ago, one one released to the iTunes app store -- http://pythonforios.com/ and it is fantastic! It includes the complete set of Python 2.7.2 documentation -- which alone is worth the $3 price.
It's a bit of a challenge to code any serious apps (which I suspect is the result of the developer having to comply w/ Apple's app guidelines), but it is a perfect place to test ideas from a train or airport (when you are without a laptop).
1 caveat -- I've only tried it on an iPad. It could be a bit cramped screen real-estate on an iphone.
Pythonista is an excellent alternative for the iOS platform - here's a nice article on it. And this one details how you can achieve workflow automation on the iPAD.
Hi there Im new to mobile application development. I had developed Android apps using Java and is just starting to get the hang of Cocoa Touch and Objective C. Now I am curious on mobile web application development to create cross platform/device applications which would at least run on Android and iOS(Apple devices: iphone, ipad). I tried Titanium and developing applications with this framework seems very promising. Although it is very powerful, popular, mature, documented and very easy to learn I had doubts investing time and to commit on using this framework for my projects after reading this blog which many Titanium users seems to agree with Why you should stay away from appcelerators titanium.
It seems that release v1.6 sdk and v1.7 sdk have the issue which they describe, the negative comments stopped right after the v1.8 sdk release was out.
My question is, is Titanium v1.8 sdk free from the memory starvation issue and other issues which were discussed on the blog post?
Would you personally recommend this for production use? And by the way I am using the 1.0.7.201112152014 Titanium build does this use the 1.8 sdk? Thanks in advance.
Take a close look at the progress of comments. It starts from people agreeing with him, and in the end everyone disagrees.
You can select the SDK you wish in the tiapp.xml editor, which is embedded in Titanium Studio. You should indeed use 1.8.x
The platform isn't, and probably never will be, memory issue free. But it also depends on how you build your app.
Stay away as much as you can from includes. And also stay away from creating a window/view/etc. with a file as url in it, this causes most memory issues because it's in a different space.
If you code well, you can use it perfectly without any issues.
Blog post author here. I don't fully agree with Topener - go ahead and read the comments yourself, it's just not true that "in the end everyone disagrees".
For what's worth: my experience is related to version 1.6.2. I've talked to people working with trunk and they told me that the memory issues are far from being resolved.
The only approach that seems to work is, as mentioned in the comments, the Tweetanium approach. But beware, that's not "if you code well". It's "if you code the way Titanium likes". If you take a look at Tweetanium (I suggest you to do it no matter what you decide to do in the end) you'll see that it has a very specific way to deal with architecture. If you follow that path, you should be good. If you think that the way Tweetanium is structured is good for you application, go for it. Be wary though, because (at least in what I consider to be complex) Tweetanium is not very complex, and with growing complexity I found that their approach is difficult to maintain. Again, evaluate for yourself.
Then there's the Android issue. Android support is far from optimal - Wunderlist decided to rewrite their Android version in native, I myself have had huge problems in making anything even remotely complex in iOS working decently on Android. If you need to support only iOS it's alright but, if that's the case, I don't see why you shouldn't write the app directly in Objective-C... considering also the (unavoidable) delay/mismatch between the Titanium and the iOS SDK.
Just my 2c. I suggest you not to take the decision lightly - it costed us a lot.
Does anybody have experiences from cross platform mobile app development framework MoSync?
It sounds very good and promises much. But does it deliver?
We have used MoSync for 8 months now and I have a good feeling about it. It is still magic to me that you code in C++ and out comes a jar-file or whatever platform you choose.
It is great for application development but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming with advanced graphics. It seems too slow for that on Symbian.
The APIs are very easy and I learned it very fast. And I have the freedom to do whatever components I want thanks to the MAUI framework and using widgets with skins. You can really make an application look very nice.
It is great for me as a developer that I can support so many phones and platforms. I can also do specific behavior and include/exclude functionality based on the phones capabilities.
When it comes to deployment I end up with hundreds of binaries for every device and I have to take care of them my self. To put them on a web server somewhere and make sure that every user get the correct binary when they try to download the app. I wished that they had some kind of app-store so they could host the apps.
MoSync still have a bit to go until it is working properly. There is no guaranty that an application that is build for a specific device actually works on that device. But I'm sure that they will reach there very soon. And when they do... I simply just need to rebuild my app with the SDK (I think).
Have you seen Mosync 2.6, I think this solves most of the problems you mentioned,
the feature list is at:
http://www.mosync.com/documentation/manualpages/whats-new-mosync-26-pyramid
I personally I'm quite excited about the whole HTML 5 integration, it sort of blurs the line between native and web app.
Hope this Helps
Tony