I am building a book application in Flash Professional CS5.5 to be released on tablet devices and I am trying to understand the best structure for loading the application. For iOS devices I know I can include the default.png, but how can accomplish a similar task for Android? The book application is also going to be large as it includes a lot of assets and animations, is there a good way to show that this is loading on both platforms?
One thing I was trying was a loading screen where the main application was actually a loading system that would import the compiled SWF book, but further research shows that it won't work for iOS devices.
Thanks for any tips or pointers.
Well, in the end, I'm developing the main app itself for iOS and exporting that with the Default.png. Then the Android version is a smaller splashscreen/preloader app which will load the SWF version of the iOS app. Is this the correct way of doing it? Probably not, but it's what I've come up with after reading way too many articles that brush the concept.
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I wanted to get a more experienced opinion on something I recently found out. A couple of months ago I set a goal to build myself a mobile app, and the first thing I did was go to developer.android.com and begin reading documentation on how to go about doing this.
I've invested a lot of time in understanding Android Studio and how to make simple apps (and I'm just now getting the hang of it all), but I just recently read about frameworks like PhoneGap(which let web devs who know HTML,CSS, and Javascript make apps too).
Before learning Android, I taught myself web dev through the Odin Project, which taught me a fair amount of HTML, CSS, and Javascript (little iffy on this language, but I'm sure it's something I could pick up easily since I already have a bit of experience).
I'm wondering what you guys feel are the limitations of using these frameworks and whether I should switch over to them, as opposed to continuing with Android since things are beginning to click for me.
Thanks!
I have developed apps for both Android and Phonegap. Phonegap takes advantage of your web development experience and lets you build mobile apps with ease. But it's not a replacement for Android API itself. A good phonegap application requires knowledge about web development and Android API.
However if your aim is to develop an android application, and you are comfortable with web development and Android, I would advice to take Android API.
Phonegap as wonderful as it is for web developers, and startups who can't afford to have dedicated resources for Android, iOS separately, has its limitations.
Performance : Phonegap app's performance is not at par with a native
android application.
Functionality : As one would expect you can't have all the functionality support a native android application has.
Look : You could easily tell apart a phonegap application from a native one. Given phonegap renders all the content in a webview, the look of native ui elements is lost
I think you will always need access to the native API to make good apps.
At least the navigation should be native, so that your app has the look and feel that the user expects, and so that stuff like the back button get correctly handled for you.
Even if there is some plugin that does that for you in a perfect way, I believe it's beneficial to know how Android works.
In the end, frameworks like PhoneGap add a layer inside your app rather than removing one, and it's always better to understand what goes on inside your app.
So the time that you've spent learning native Android won't be lost.
However, it makes sense to use HTML/JS if you want to share code between different platforms.
I think this article from Basecamp shows a very compelling example: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native-navigation-web-content.
I want to build a simple app where everything is offline and mostly it is an informational app with info pages and list pages. What is the best way to build an HTML5 app for it so I can easily port it to different platforms? I'm looking for a free solution.
This developer had an HTML5 app so he just converted it to and Android app as mentioned in the answer: Convert HTML5 into standalone Android App. So, is that the way to go if I'm building one from scratch? Would it be just as easy to convert it to iOS?
Also, how does performance look for such an app on Android/iOS/Windows Phone? I mean would the page sliding animation and stuff be just as fluid as a native app given that it is so simple?
Give PhoneGap a shot. It's probably the most popular platform that allows you to create mobile apps utilizing a browser, and it's free to use :)
We have a very strong base of iOS apps and salesforce running at the backend. I am trying to get the similar app running on Android but using PhoneGap (not going native).
I had few questions about this:
Does PhoneGap put any limitation on how much RAM can be used for an
app? If yes, how much?
Our iOS apps tend to consume upto 100MB of memory when multiple views and data are loaded in the app, is this feasible using PhoneGap?
CORE data gives me a nice GUI to design my local storage, how can that be achieved in Android?
Is there any way I can import the exact data model from iOS to android?
I spent quite some time searching this but did not get any satisfactory answer. All your help is much appreciated.
PhoneGap doesn't put any limits on how much memory is used. If there are any sort of memory limits it would come from the OS itself.
If you can build it as a website, you can build it with PhoneGap. The only thing to watch out for is if you don't manage your DOM structure you could actually crash the WebView, but if you manage it well you should be fine.
Unfortunately with PhoneGap, especially with offline apps, the only two options you have are localStorage and Web SQL.
AFAIK there is no way of exporting the data model to Android that would be usable with PhoneGap. The closest would be to go though and try to recreate through one of the storage options I listed in 3 that are supported and well documented with PhoneGap.
I want to know what are the limitions/Restrictions and the Performance of an AIR application for iOS/Android devices such as ipad2,galacy tabs.
I want to Build an application in AIR which will have charts,a local database i.e, sqlite of size 10MB.
How will this kind of application performs on ipad2?
Is there any restrictions on memory usage??
Any max limit on the size of sqlite database on ipad?
Is there any issues to create this type of AIR application for ipad?
Any useful videos,blogs ,links on development for air applicaiton for iOS will be appreciated.
Thanks,
You can find and browse a lot of good demonstrations here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AdobeADC/videos?query=flex+mobile
and
http://tv.adobe.com/search/?q=Flex+mobile
Particularly I think you might want to watch these two first:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH3NYeM1SfA&feature=plcp
I only just found this newer one, but it speaks to performance and compatible devices demonstrates a few completed example apps that are currently on markets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVeC7KdkDc&feature=relmfu
This video demonstrates two apps, one with a lots of graphs running on multiple devices. (Running very nicely too =D )
I don't remember having seen any mention of memory or size limitations in all my reading & video watching. (Which does include a lot of videos & tutorials that were not produced by Adobe)
There may be a lot technical data in this video, but as of now I haven't watched it yet (~61 minutes):
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2011-develop/how-to-develop-amazing-enterprise-air-apps-for-tablets-and-smartphones/
The apps require Adobe AIR to be installed to run though and because Apple doesn't like Flash/Adobe; AIR has be be bundled into the app itself. As a result, the size of of an app is bigger than expected because Flex built apps can share a single AIR install like on Android & Blackberry.
This is a good example tutorial if you're just starting to learn about it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4m0CHos-rw&feature=relmfu
And as of today (5/6/12), Adobe last released version 4.6.1 in December and donated Flex to the Apache Foundation. You can find lots of details about that here:
http://blogs.apache.org/flex/
Hope this helps =D
Todd
I have been developing an Android application for about two months now, and the guy I'm writing it for wants me to use this instead of the android SDK so we can deploy the application for multiple smart phones: http://rhomobile.com/
he says you can write the application in one language and it can be deployed for most smart phones. Has anyone used this website to do something similar? Any advantages or disadvantages I should know about and tell him? Maybe someone could give me a better explanation on what this really does.
I'm current a one man army. He wants the application out for most smart phones but can afford to hire more developers.
Rhomobile will start up a small webserver on your phone and then show a webview that is directed to this webserver. You are able to write all the application logic in ruby in a way you would do it if you would write a web app that is deployed on a real web server. Rhomobile uses CSS etc. to have the app look look a little bit like a native app.
If you know Ruby you will get an App fast but it will look crappy and the user experience will be crappy too. A similar framework is appcelerator titanium they will let you write the app in Java Script and then compile it into a mix of javascript, webview and native components that run on an Iphone and on an Android phone and titanium has a much nicer user experience then rhomobile.
Visit their pages and test some of the apps that they are promoting as showcase for their frameworks.
As many developers writing apps in Objective C have learned using HTML for the view and styling with CSS styling libraries is a great way to create attractive native apps. Rhomobile's Rhodes uses this approach as well. We used to let people use whatever CSS they wanted and they could choose to use IUI, JQTouch, IWebKit, WebApp.net or any other library along with Rhodes. The best external apps all seemed to use JQTouch for styling and animated transitions.
Recently we decided to ship with our own fork of JQTouch (which we made work on Android) in order to make this even easier. The recent Rhodes master branch created apps with JQTouch builtin makes such attractive apps even easier to build, as the stylesheets are included with Rhodes scaffold-generated apps.