Is there a best/good way to go about cross-platform app development, like a game, for Android and iOS simultaneously (and Mac OS X)?
Just to simply develop an app that uses OpenGL and C/C++ only should be very simple, shouldn't it? As long as I didn't get into sound or even interaction at first?
I looked into the NDK, but there are all these warnings about how people shouldn't use it. I want to do everything myself as much as possible so I have not looked into things like Cocos2D ... is there any tutorial which just gets like an openGL "Hello World" going cross platform?
Thanks
Bob
Unity3d (game engine) is the best and easiest way to develop cross platform games. Due to the facts thats is supports many platforms.
The Platforms supported by unity3d are Android, Iphone, Mac & Window, web, Flash, Ps3, Wii, and even Linux.
The main benefit of using it is you do not have to rewrite your code (only some minor changes) to port it other platforms.
It supports C#, Javascript as well as boo for scripting.
The best thing about it. It has a strong support and great community to solve your problems.
You can create a cross platform Hello World in Unity3d in few minutes for various platforms like mac, windows, android, iphone, web.
I know it is not close (unity3d) as you want to pure coding enviroment but if your objective is cross platform games then unity3d is the best way (also the fastest).
Check it out http://unity3d.com/
I'm currently developing a multi-platform game (iOS,Android,Java-openGL,Flash and HTML5) using a google framework called PlayN http://code.google.com/p/playn/
It works great and have had a good feedback from the author when I hit problems
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I want to make a game with my friends on iOs, Android, WP operating systems. We decided to use a cocos2d-x and develop the core of the game on C++. What will be the right way of developing so that we can write the game all together simultaneously but just build the project differently on every platform. We thought of writing the core of the game in C++ in Visual Studio, but there is the problem: How can we test it fast on every platform? How people usually develop multi-platform projects?. Also we would really like to hear some recommendations about the source controlling of the whole project. Thank you in advance.
Best way to develop a game on Cocos 2Dx is to
Develop Complete Game for one platform most probably iOS or Windows.
Port your game to other platforms.Fix minor bugs that occurs.
You can use GitHub to Work in groups.
Make sure you test your apps on devices because some features are
platform specific like ads etc.
For source control you have several options such as Git or SVN. Personally I quite like Git as it doesn't require a central server as it is peer to peer. That means if it all goes wrong with your host you still have a full copy. In terms of good and repository hosting I would take a look at https://bitbucket.org/
To test on iOS I believe you'd better got a Mac instead of windows box.
I hope this question is specific enough. I have a client for whom I made an iOS native app and an Android native app (same app, different platform). It's a fixed pixel design (I made this work for Android somehow:) and it works on iPad, iPhone and most Android devices (with some letterboxing). Now I am asked to write the same app for the Windows store and they want me to use HTML and JavaScript. My question is, when I use HTML and JavaScript, would it be "easy" for me to use this code into some sort of hybrid solution (PhoneGap, etc)? The app doesn't need much complicated functionality but does need to support push notifications on iOS and it needs to be able to play videos, preferably HLS. Any advice on what the best hybrid solution and do hybrid solutions allow you to build for Windows 8?
I'm a cross-platform developer working on PhoneGap and Titanium Appcelerator. The correct answer is "It depends". Currently the state of cross-platform development is not very recommendable. Yes, you can write plugins for PhoneGap and it does support windows phone but you will have a ridiculously hard time getting them to communicate with each other properly. I learnt this from experience.
If it was a hacking/hobby project to further the cause then I would say go for it but for a time-bound client project like yours, I would recommend against cross-platform solutions and go native instead. Plus native always gives considerably better control, speed and ease of development. You will probably develop it faster in native than cross platform anyway. I've played around with windows SDK and it seems easy to use and well-built with good documentation and you can use C# which is similar to Java since you have already used it on android.
You can also build windows 8 desktop apps using html and javascript natively but this isn't present in windows phone 8 yet.
As I mentioned, If you don't need too many native controls, then you can go cross-platform. For your requirements, it can be done. If you have already developed android and ios apps and only need windows app now, then going native would be easier. But if you have to make all 3 then you can go cross platform if your requirements are restricted to what you mention. Here's a good quora thread that discusses the pro's and cons:
http://www.quora.com/Is-Titanium-good-for-developing-iPhone-apps
Take a look on Xamarin
Main idea - they brings real native code for all platforms.
They have instruments to compile C# code that it can be used at all platforms
For example you should create UI in XCode (for iPhone) and use ModoDevelop to create DAL/BLL, then you can re-use C# code base over all other platforms
They have cross-platform iPhone/Android/WP7/W8 samples on GitHub
Also see Q&A on Stackoverflow tagged Xamaring
We are starting to build multiple apps for multiple clients both in IOS and Android native platforms. The problem is we are going completely native which is taking too much time.
I would like to look at the linked in method (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-linkedins-mobile-engineering/) which is a more hybrid approach using HTML and native code.
The problem is I don't think Phonegap is that good - good for prototyping but maybe not for full versions of apps as it can be a bit slow and a bit buggy.
I would like to look into doing a model where we create like 65% HTML and 35% native to that device (like linked in)
Would anyone have any suggestions for this? Would people say we need a massive development team to pull such an approach off?
I welcome thought:)
Thanks
I'm planning on writing a multiplayer game with Android as my primary focus as far as OS/platform, but I would like the ability to port the game to at least the web. I'm looking into Andengine as I'm just starting out with java and android and it seems the most noob friendly. The game shouldn't be too demanding as it will be a 2d turn based game with simple animations and chat.
So my main question - is it possible to port a Andengine game to the web?
If not what would you suggest?
I looked at libgdx, but I'm concerned that it might be a little to advanced for someone just starting out with java/android. Am I correct in my assumption?
Another idea I've been playing around with is writing the game in Flash and porting it to Android with Adobe Air - does anyone have any experience with this? Is it a bad idea? I kind of have my doubts of how well this will work, but if nobody can really talk me down from this idea, I might just go this route.
I've also considered writing the game in pygame as it seems easier but I don't like the idea of players having to download something like Pygame Subset for Android or Kivy to run the game. So basically if the other options are either too difficult or wont work on android then I'm probably just going to go with Andengine and consider rewriting it later for the web if people like it enough.
Moai SDK is an open source multi-platform framework for game developers.
One codes in lua - a dynamic programming language (that is easy to learn).
Apps made using Moai can be deployed to iOS, android and the chrome web store.
Moai could be an alternative.
Andengine makes a fine starting place. (I have made 3 projects with it now and I really like it). but it does not deploy to anything other than android. That is its strength and its weakness. As a strength, it is very easy to integrate android OS features and libraries with your project and has good performance. And as a weakness, well, it only runs on android.
Code-once publish anywhere platforms trade off development time for speed and size usually.
Some top competitors in that area are:
Ancsa Corona
AppMobi
PhoneGap
Unity3D
Adobe Flash(bonus of web distribution)
and others. (Moai SDK listed by #andrew, for example)
Each platform has had successful games launched with them. Find the one that suits you and your projects needs best. Do not forget to check for things you will want to integrate, such as using Facebook for mobile, or AdMob, or OpenFeint or other 3rd party services.
Good luck and enjoy you game making!
Just a side note, user do not need to download "Kivy" to run the game. As other toolkit, your application will provide Kivy as other libraries you'll use.
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I've been playing around with developing Android apps in Java for a while and am starting to get a handle on it. However if I want to on start on an iOS version I need to code everything from scratch - which is, well, undesirable.
I was wondering on what cross platform solutions there are available and how well they work in practice. I've been thinking about web applications - perhaps using jQuery Mobile or Titanium, or Adobe Flash/Flex/Air. I also don't yet have a Mac, which I'll probably have to invest in.
So my Questions :
What cross-platform development environments exist for iOS / Android (and/or other devices)?
What has your experience been with these tools? (this is what I'm really keen to know)
Disclaimer: I work for a company, Particle Code, that makes a cross-platform framework. There are a ton of companies in this space. New ones seem to spring up every week. Good news for you: you have a lot of choices.
These frameworks take different approaches, and many of them are fundamentally designed to solve different problems. Some are focused on games, some are focused on apps. I would ask the following questions:
What do you want to write? Enterprise application, personal productivity application, puzzle game, first-person shooter?
What kind of development environment do you prefer? IDE or plain ol' text editor?
Do you have strong feelings about programming languages? Of the frameworks I'm familiar with, you can choose from ActionScript, C++, C#, Java, Lua, and Ruby.
My company is more in the game space, so I haven't played as much with the JavaScript+CSS frameworks like Titanium, PhoneGap, and Sencha. But I can tell you a bit about some of the games-oriented frameworks. Games and rich internet applications are an area where cross-platform frameworks can shine, because these applications tend to place more importance of being visually unique and less on blending in with native UIs. Here are a few frameworks to look for:
Unity www.unity3d.com is a 3D games engine. It's really unlike any other development environment I've worked in. You build scenes with 3D models, and define behavior by attaching scripts to objects. You can script in JavaScript, C#, or Boo. If you want to write a 3D physics-based game that will run on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, or consoles, this is probably the tool for you. You can also write 2D games using 3D assets--a fine example of this is indie game Max and the Magic Marker, a 2D physics-based side-scroller written in Unity. If you don't know it, I recommend checking it out (especially if there are any kids in your household). Max is available for PC, Wii, iOS and Windows Phone 7 (although the latter version is a port, since Unity doesn't support WinPhone). Unity comes with some sample games complete with 3D assets and textures, which really helps getting up to speed with what can be a pretty complicated environment.
Corona www.anscamobile.com/corona is a 2D games engine that uses the Lua scripting language and supports iOS and Android. The selling point of Corona is the ability to write physics-based games very quickly in few lines of code, and the large number of Corona-based games in the iOS app store is a testament to its success. The environment is very lean, which will appeal to some people. It comes with a simulator and debugger. You add your text editor of choice, and you have a development environment. The base SDK doesn't include any UI components, like buttons or list boxes, but a CoronaUI add-on is available to subscribers.
The Particle SDK www.particlecode.com is a slightly more general cross-platform solution with a background in games. You can write in either Java or ActionScript, using a MVC application model. It includes an Eclipse-based IDE with a WYSIWYG UI editor. We currently support building for Android, iOS, webOS, and Windows Phone 7 devices. You can also output Flash or HTML5 for the web. The framework was originally developed for online multiplayer social games, such as poker and backgammon, and it suits 2D games and apps with complex logic. The framework supports 2D graphics and includes a 2D physics engine.
NB:
Today we announced that Particle Code has been acquired by Appcelerator, makers of the Titanium cross-platform framework.
...
As of January 1, 2012, [Particle Code] will no longer officially support the [Particle SDK] platform.
Source
The Airplay SDK www.madewithmarmalade.com is a C++ framework that lets you develop in either Visual Studio or Xcode. It supports both 2D and 3D graphics. Airplay targets iOS, Android, Bada, Symbian, webOS, and Windows Mobile 6. They also have an add-on to build AirPlay apps for PSP. My C++ being very rusty, I haven't played with it much, but it looks cool.
In terms of learning curve, I'd say that Unity had the steepest learning curve (for me), Corona was the simplest, and Particle and Airplay are somewhere in between.
Another interesting point is how the frameworks handle different form factors. Corona supports dynamic scaling, which will be familiar to Flash developers. This is very easy to use but means that you end up wasting screen space when going from a 4:3 screen like the iPhone to a 16:9 like the new qHD Android devices. The Particle SDK's UI editor lets you design flexible layouts that scale, but also lets you adjust the layouts for individual screen sizes. This takes a little more time but lets you make the app look custom made for each screen.
Of course, what works for you depends on your individual taste and work style as well as your goals -- so I recommend downloading a couple of these tools and giving them a shot. All of these tools are free to try.
Also, if I could just put in a public service announcement -- most of these tools are in really active development. If you find a framework you like, by all means send feedback and let them know what you like, what you don't like, and features you'd like to see. You have a real opportunity to influence what goes into the next versions of these tools.
MonoTouch and MonoDroid but what will happen to that part of Attachmate now is anybody's guess. Of course even with the mono solutions you're still creating non cross platform views but the idea being the reuse of business logic.
Keep an eye on http://www.xamarin.com/ it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
My experience with making something very simple in PhoneGap+jQuery Mobile was fine. I was able to do it quickly for iOS. However, it didn't work on my Android phones without making some changes. The project was a very simple app to take pictures and post them to a web site. And at the end of the day it felt "clunky" compared to a true native app.
I don't believe there will ever be easy cross platform development. I think the browser is as close as you will get. By choosing something like PhoneGap I think you are just trading one set of pain points for a different set of pain points.
In case you do not want to use a full-fledged framework for cross-platform development, take a look at C++ as an option. iOS fully supports using C++ for your application logic via Objective-C++. I don't know how well Android's support for C++ via the NDK is suited for doing your business logic in C++ rather than just some performance-critical code snippets, but in case that use case is well supported, you could give it a try.
This approach of course only makes sense if your application logic constitutes the greatest part of your project, as the user interfaces will have to be written individually for each platform.
As a matter of fact, C++ is the single most widely supported programming language (with the exception of C), and is therefore the core language of most large cross-platform applications.
Although I've just begun looking at this area of development, I think it comes down to this basic difference: some tools retain the original code, and some port to native...
for instance, PhoneGap just keeps the HTML/CSS/JS code that you write, and wraps it in sufficient iOS code to qualify as an app, whereas Appcelerator delivers you an XCode project...so if you're not familiar with iOS, then that wouldn't really provide any benefit to you over PhoneGap, but if you DO know a bit, that might give you just a bit more ability to tweak the native versions after your larger coding effort.
I haven't used appcelerator myself, but worked on a project a couple weeks ago where one of our team members made an entire iPad app in about 24 hours using it.
And yes, to actually submit to apple, you'll have to get a mac, but if that's not your primary work platform you can go cheap.
Cappuccino or PhoneGap.
Sometimes though trying to find a shortcut does not save you time or give you a comparable end product.
There's also MoSync Mobile SDK
GPL and commercial licensing. There's a good overview of their approach here.
If you've ever used LUA, you might try Corona SDK can create apps that run on IOS and Android
https://coronalabs.com/
I've downloaded it and messed around some, I find LUA a very easy to learn scripting language without the usual scripting language hassles/limitations....
There is also BatteryTech which we've been using for the past 18 months and have released several games off of it. http://www.batterypoweredgames.com/batterytech
All C++, Android and iOS support, all users get full source. The new v2 includes lua bindings.
I'm facing a dilemma: I have a solid ASP.NET development experience in C# and looking to start mobile development. I have done research and know that there are some hacks for getting a development environment for iOS on windows, and recently after Apple lifted ban on 3rd party dev apps, Adobe Flash CS5 can be used to package iOS apps. I do have some prior experience with Flash and AS2.
So my question is: should i use Flash CS5 for iOS and MonoDroid for Android or should i just get Mac and learn Objective C for iOS and learn Java for Android? What would be the most practical solution?
Thank you in advance
EDIT: In the end, after trying out both Java Development in Eclipse against Android SDK and Mono for Android, I decided it's best to write Android apps in native environment. Eclipse FTW! As for iOS, I think it will also be best to use native Mac tools and Objective C.
While there are ways to get around using Objective-C for iOS development, I'm going to recommend that you learn it anyway. You need a Mac to deploy anyway, you might as well use it to develop as well.
Objective-C is bloody bizarre when you first start using it, with its strange square brackets and odd ways of doing things. However, once you've spent some time writing code in it, a change happens in your brainmeats and you suddenly realize that this is really an elegant way to work. Xcode is also quite an excellent IDE.
You can start with the iPhone Applications Programming lessons on iTunesU from Stanford. It's free, and covers what you'll need to know pretty throughly.
Worst case, you've learned a new language, and how Apple thinks iPhone apps should be developed. Even if you ultimately use something else, that understanding will help you out long term.
Take a look at monotouch & MonoDroid (Coming Soon), it still requires a mac. But you can open your solutions in VS2010 and use resharper, and just use the Mac for deploying and building. Take a look at this Here to open monodevelop solutions in Visual Studio.
http://monotouch.net
For Android, I would recommend learning Java. I just started working with Android in Java on my Windows machine after developing some ASP.NET sites. I'm familiar with Java, but the syntax is so similar to C# that it's very easy to understand and pick up. So far it is more difficult figuring out and remembering the details of the architecture of mobile applications as opposed to the language. It also helps that there are a number of good books and online resources for converting from C# to Java and vice versa.
Update: I found a good post over on programmers.stackexchange.com that talks about C# vs. Java for Android development with good discussion on the pros and cons of switching: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/33076/as-a-c-developer-would-you-learn-java-to-develop-for-android-or-use-monodroid-i
#Dimitri I was almost your identical skill set when iOS 2.0 was released. I decided to try and learn Objective-C and now its my language of choice. Its a bit different to start with but most of the changes are simple to learn. Whether you are programming for iOS using Objective-C or something like Monotouch either way you have to learn the frameworks. If you use Monotouch you will never be able to be on the bleeding edge of the iOS enhancements. Using Objective-C you will be able to use the latest beta APIs and ensure your apps work right. You will need a Mac to deploy to the App store so just bite the bullet and get a Mac. Get a MacBook Air 13"
I went the route of Monotouch for iOS and Java for the Android. Unfortunately, Monotouch still requires a Mac. I am currently participating in the MonoDroid beta, which looks pretty promising too. It's all a matter of taste. I should also note that, for the most part, HTML/Javascript is a nice way to get portable apps in some circumstances. I would expect HTML5 apps to become even more viable as tooling improves.
I choose to use the Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android technology stack from Novell. When coupled with a micro framework like MonoCross (open source in Google code) it helps me write applications for both iPhone and Android devices while leveraging a shared code base for much of it. I would highly suggest the same route, it has allowed me to implement numerous solutions for small businesses and enterprise customers alike.
I didn't have the ASP .NET experience like you, but I was a Pocket PC/Windows CE developer so C# and the .NET Framework were also my strongest tools when I started on journey towards Mono many moons ago.
You can do iOS,Android and Windows using Xamarin.
Android and Windows can be done easily but doing iOS on Windows was tough so far like networked mac is required for debug and development but things have changed now.
Microsoft has introduced Xamarin Live Player using which you can debug,develop and deploy the app completely in windows without the help of any Apple system but to sign and release the app to appstore you will need Apple System though