We have an upcoming [big] project, involving a series of mobile apps. Unfortunately we're still new to this market. Our biggest problem is not learning something new, but rather having to develop the same app twice which means approx ~ twice the cost and Hence we're trying to find a cross platform solution.
Since our expertise is in C# and .NET we are very interested in MonoDroid/Touch, and from what I've read that it is a mature framework.
However it is not exactly cross-platform (or am I wrong ?) and so we turned to Phonegap, which lets you build mobile apps with js, css and html which are technologies which we feel comfortable using.
Our apps are going to be very data intensive and might also require to be "invoked" by the server, i.e. there might be 2-way communication between the server and the app.
and so my question, given these kind of apps would you suggest phonegap or monoTouch/Droid?
Thanks in advance.
Monotouch is NOT cross platform. It allows you to create reusable elements, but you can't build once and deploy to all platforms, especially if your project is really as complex as you are making it sound.
I don't know much about phonegap. I've always steered clear of it. It might have changed since I looked at it last, but as I gather its not very robust and doesn't create very good apps, especially (again) for a complex app.
There is another cross platform framework called Titanium, but similarly to the both above its not great. There is more support for it every day, but it is missing some key components and you tend to get so far into a project and realise that you're not able to get any further.
My answer, which you're not going to want to hear, is that you should do it for each platform separately, and charge your client as such.
Creating a mobile app cross platform is like creating a t-shirt that will fit everyone. Ok, so you can make it stretchy, and you can design it in a way that will "suit" everyone, but what you'll end up with is something that is going to be too big or too small, and no-one will enjoy.
iPhone, android, iPad, blackberry, windows phone 7, bada etc etc they're all VERY different platforms. Just because they're both mobile phones doesn't make them similar at all. The way that the UI is designed and displayed is varyingly different, and the way you interact with the hardware (and ultimately the user) is also different. Case and point - iPhone as you go down views you create a navigation stack which you navigate using a back button in the title bar (which has the title of the current view in it). Android you navigate with the back button on the device and the action bar is used for the app title and other "action buttons".
To this end I would suggest, if you REALLY don't want to do everything natively (which is definitely the best option) then I would suggest looking at Monotouch and creating two apps with reusable components.
With PhoneGap you will create a web application. It can look like a native app, but it's really a web app running inside a browser object.
You'll be programming the client HTML and javascript, just like any other client side web app. You can create ajax calls to the server to get your data and do all your usual C#/.Net stuff there.
With Mono, you will create a clients side application, and you can program that client in C#/.Net.
PhoneGap will be more or less free and can be used for other platforms than Windows, iOS and Android as well, though you'll have to setup environments for each version. You can compile for all platforms in the cloud, but that'll cost you money.
MonoTouch/Droid will set you back a few hundred dollars.
For each platform, you will have to do some extra tweaking. Probably giving it a native look and feel, call different API's, etc.
I would personally advise the Mono route, since you know C#/.Net already. It'll give you results faster. Make use of the free trial for MonoTouch and see if it's something for you and if it's worth buying ($698 for both 'touch and 'droid).
It depends.
I agree that going native gives you the best possible performance and user experience. It's certainly the only feasible option if the app has a demanding UI. But if the app is more informational (perhaps displays news feeds for example) then a hybrid HTML5 app could be the go. The support of HTML5 within a UIWebView on iOS has some quirks in the older iOS versions so tread with caution. And on Android and other platforms, HTML5 isn't quite there yet. Certainly not on older hardware that doesn't have the grunt or browsers with suboptimal javascript engines.
With your .NET background, I suggest you have a look at http://www.vsnomad.com and evaluate it for yourself. Throw a quick demo together and see how it holds up. Otherwise, yeah, go the native route.
Related
I'm planning to create a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) mobile app for both iOS and Android devices. (iOS 11 or above / Android 6 or above)
I and my friend used both Java and Swift.
Although we searched about Xamarin or PhoneGap App,
we wanted to use our previous working environment (Xcode/Android Studio) as possible, not spending time on learning new tools.
So we want to work on a BLE app and we want to make it work on both Android and iOS. Currently, we are making the same thing using Swift and Java.
Since the UI part overlaps for both platform, we wish to ask these questions, please.
If we use Swift and Java separately, we noticed that when a picture is changed, we have to update both to each separate code.
For example, we wanted to change the round button to a square button shape. Currently, we upload the same picture to the GitHub repository respectively. So we felt something is not efficient and we want to ask is there a better way to change both sides of the app.
Solutions which require prices, like adding Amazon Web Service S3, is also welcomed.
We are creating the same UI for both platforms using Swift and Java. Since the UI, button, etc (the interface parts) overlaps for both app, is there a way to code the same UI so both of us don't have to spend time for working the same thing?
Maybe something like Xamarin could be one way, but I want to hear various advice, please.
Why not just put the images in a common folder in source control that both builds can access it? That's the common way of doing it. Using S3 (or any other server) will work if you want to download it at runtime, but since you tried checking it into source control it seems like you want it part of the build.
As for the UI- native Android and iOS have completely different UIs and ways of working with it. Really unless you want to go with an html app, you're going to write two different UIs. The UIs are the least sharable part of a mobile app. At least for business logic you have a few options (worst case you can always use C, which runs on both).
This might sound a bit of a stupid question, but I'm doing a project where I'm using an ANN to diagnose Sepsis in patients using various vital signs as inputs. The aim is to then develop an Android app that allows a user to put in the inputs and will return a risk score (% likelihood of sepsis, etc)
I'm constructing my ANN using Matlab (using their pattern recognition network wizard), and I'm using MIT App Inventor 2 to build the App itself.
Where I'm struggling, is understanding how one would actually put the ANN into the app. Can anyone explain how this works to me, or even just point me in some vague direction?
There is a matlab-compatible programming language called Octave, and it works on Android as well. You might want to take a look at it, it's called addi.
Matlab/Octave is great for scientific prototyping. Once you enter the realm of mobile applications, the best option is to re-write the libraries in Java. It could be painful but with a proper design you will be able to scale your app without depending in Matlab/Octave hacks.
If this absolutely positively has to be present on Android, on the phone itself, the straightforward way to do this is to write the software in Java and then write the Android GUI around it.
But does the software absolutely need to be on the phone? Maybe. But if not, why not make the Android part a client that communicates with a more powerful and flexible remote server? The server can implement in whatever language it likes.
I'm about to start developing my first Android application, I have been reading through the developer documentation, but am unclear on how user interactions are handled.
As a front end developer, I use alot of css/jquery to create rich and interactive user interfaces.
I see that Android has it's own version of stylesheets, which seem pretty straight forward, but I am left wondering how I can replace something like js/jquery. Is it possible to use JQ mobile for native Android apps? Is there a replacement to this? Does android's UI handle this?
I'm a little confused.
Yes, it is still possible to heavily leverage your js/jquery skills and create a solid Android application that provides a rich user interface which is primarily js.
This will obviously depend greatly on what kind of application you're writing however if you own a website that delivers rich web content to end users and you'd like to replicate this in an Android application then you should take a look at webviews. They should support most of what you're trying to do in js or JQuery and it would be a quick process to mock up a test app to see if it meets you needs. I have run into a few quirks when replicating some interactive d3js visualizations which required extra tweaking before working properly on mobile devices.
I expect these minor issues will be ironed out in the next few releases of Android. Kitkat is going to include webviews that are based on Chromium which will include an updated version of the javascript engine. Your best bet is to just test it out, the amount of Java code required for a mock application is quite minimal.
I'm planning to create a TV Guide app. The app has to interact with a server to get the data and display it in a timetable. The speed and UX are really important. Nothing flashy, I just want the page and state transitions to be very smooth and the assets/icons to look very good. Is it viable to use Phonegap for this app? I'm more proficient in HTML+CSS+javascript than Java/Obj-C but won't mind going native if it's the best way provide awesome UX.
You can totally do it with phonegap. I'd recommend using a javascript framework as well such as backbone.js for transitions and such.
PhoneGap just wrapps a native-app hull around a browser-application. This means: the phonegap-app must simulate a webbrowser and its javascript-engine. It does not convert your application into a real native app. This makes phonegap-apps slower than native apps.
I made bad experiences with an app that is scrolling through a long table of more than 1000 items, each of them holding five text-strings and two icons. Scrolling through the first 10 or 20 items was reasonable, but at item #50 it became really slow, and beyond item #100 scrolling was almost imposible.
So I wrote a native iPhone-App, and it scrolls at the end of the list as fast as at the beginning.
conclusio:
PhoneGap is fine for simple apps that need little resources. But when dealing with long lists or pages that are made of many different items, phonegap is considerable slower than a native app.
Really the decision to use phonegap comes down to abilities, resources and performance needs. Phonegap will be slower than native just by it's very nature that it's another layer on top of native whereas native is optimized to be as fast as possible. Then the second question is your resources. If you only plan on releasing to one platform and have the ability to build native, that could make the most sense. On the other hand if you don't have the resources and want to build to multiple platforms quicker, phonegap will definitely fill that need.
For frameworks, there is sencha, jquery mobile, Dojo Mobile (I find that framework to be the most difficult to use) and Kendo UI (newest of the bunch but not really free either).
And another great template start is to use Mobile Boilerplate to understand the best practices for an hmtl5 starting page.
http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile
if you use phonegap, it will be more easy to create the app for the other platformes(android WP7 ...)
but improving it will take you much more time.
because to have nice transitions and effects with phonegap , you wil need some libs and frameworks like (jquery mobile ,sencha touch ,dojo framwork)
ladies and gentlemen!
Very often on my job I meet the following requirement from the client, when developing android applications: "make it look like and iPhone app".
Yes, I know, that the best way is to offer him canonical Android design with all these patterns like dashboard, using menu button etc... But sometimes this is not the case, as instead, I have to make it look and animate just the same. It's frustrating.
Can you guys, please advice me an android library (if there is one) with iOS-like UI elements? Many thanks in advance, I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
To expand on Martyn's comment, which I agree with.
Perhaps there is a great reason why a client would ask for this, but in many cases I bet they might benefit from being challenged on this requirement. If I was presented with this request, I would first ask "Why?". Perhaps they'd answer as follows:
we need a consistent experience across platforms, or
it will be more cost effective to design once and apply to each platform, or
it doesn't matter why, just do it!
Here are some responses for each:
each user will generally have one phone, and won't require the experience on Android to be identical to iPhone - they only care that it works and looks great on their phone. In fact, an Android user would prefer if you used the UI patterns that are more common to the platform, as opposed designing to match iOS. Likewise for an iPhone user.
we have found that having a designer create a set of creative for iOS allows us to pretty much use the creative as-is for Android. Even though Android might have Tabs on top, versus bottom, we are still able to take the backgrounds, button styles, fonts and color schemes from one platform to the next. There will be slight differences, but overall the brand and look should translate well. Here is an example of porting a single creative design across platforms: http://daleburgosdesign.com/
if they answer in this manner, you might want to consider passing on the job. Pixel perfect matching across platforms is tricky aside from the ideas offered in previous answers (OpenGL and the use of a WebView - via Macarse). If the client can't provide good reasoning for this tricky requirement, then it might be best to search for your next client.
Not a straight forward answer to your question, but I hope you find it helpful!
There is no iphone UI library for android that I know of. What you can do is, get the iphone GUI psd and redo it for 3 sizes of android (for the 3 size ranges) and use the elements of these psd's to theme your application.
I get these kind of similar requirements. Sometimes it wont be much about the looks but about the navigation flow of the application and how new views or activities are animated. From my experience, there is no easy way to do it. So I end up making a lot of adjustments and hacks to get the job done. And I over bill the client. :)
Btw you could also consider libraries such as Sencha Touch, it will look the same in all phones that use a webkit browser.
AFAIK there are no 'iOS-alike' widget libraries for Android.
Because of this, you could reasonably charge the client more for both development and support, thereby providing an incentive to stick with the standard Android UI design and principles.
There is no library to port iphone views to Android but if you are starting both applications from the scratch you have two possible approach to share views between both platforms.
First one is using WebViews and coding HTML, JS and CSS. This kind of app is called hybrid.
Second one is using openGL. You can do it directly or using a framework like cocos2d-x.
Depending on what you are willing to you should choose what to use.