I am about to decide which way to push our smartphone development.
I have read numerous articles about these technologies. I have also created test apps, but wanted to be 100% sure that I get this right.
I am not able to create EXACTLY the same look and feel like native app in PhoneGap because it runs in WebView Controler. And the webish look and feel is as far as I will get with this tech. correct?
(In the example app I have created with PG, the look might be similar, but there is a delay when i click on buttons and the animation is not so fluent as in native apps)
Latest Titanium seems to have changed its approach to WebView, to remedy that lack of look and feel of native apps. My question is (I havent tested this myself). Can I create EXACTLY the same look and feel of an native app with Titanium?
EXACTLY is the key word. I mean can a person tell a difference if app was created with Titanium? because I can definitely tell that app was created with PG.
Final goal is the UX, ppl sense this things, and on smartphones anything that is webish and is suppose to be appish is a bad UX i believe.
Thanks
Compared to PG Titanium is more Native like UI experience but it's kinda problematic for Android.Since it's originally intended for IOS.
Titanium for Android is pretty buggy and can mess you up and the thing that you have to come up with workarounds and if you cant find any then you are stuck.
But if you are okay with that and i can easily advise that Titanium is way to go though it's nearly native (not exactly) which close to exactly.I dont think an average user would understand Titanium .
2) yes, since titanium uses the original UI. your javascript code is wrapped to native Objective c code that creates native elements. only constraint is that your are not as flexible as with real native code written by yourself. but you can write native modules and add them to your projekt. so you're able to expand your project with custom UI too.
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).
I'm a new Android developer and I need to create an Android application which looks like Apple's App store (on both phone and tablet).
I'm a bit familiar with Native layout designer in Eclipse (ADT) and I find it really hard to design such an amazing UI.
I've searched a lot and I've found some web-based UI frameworks such as Phonegap and Chocolatechip-UI. Are these frameworks capable of designing such apps or not? Or do you suggest something else?
Thnx in advance
This question does not have a right or wrong answer. It really depends on how complex your UI is. How sleek you want it to be.
If your UI is pretty but simple and does not require very complex animations you could go for PhoneGap. however, if you have got very complex UI and want very sleek animations I suggest you use the native APIs.
This however, may change in the near future as web technology is improving really fast :)
I've looked at this doc: http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/webview.html
It seems it might be attractive strategy to use HTML/Javascript to get:
result faster (I can use my browser to create a prototype very quickly, just updating my page in the browser, and not waiting for emulator to be update my changes)
avoid to to learn Android API too deep (but use what I know HTML/CSS/JS instead)
reuse my code, putting it to iOS, BlackBerry (not only Android)
The only question I have.. Is whether someone already did it for real? Because tutorials that I've found - just show how to print 'Hello world!' message in simple HTML.
But what would be more interesting to get is 'how it works with embedded database' in android,
OR better say, as an example what I mean:
How to handle JS' "onClick" to get some data stored to db?
UPDATE:
Yeah.. there are a lot of PRODUCTS. But what if I need just a storage support (need to put and read data from db). no need anything sophisticated like camera support. What I really want to avoid is:
waiting for Emulator updated
write simple and easy components and layout in HTML to get instant result (it seems more natural for me, even though I'm Java Dev.. but it's lame to wait for result building and waiting when working with UI)
I'm looking for someone's existing experience to avoid addition complexity and time gaps between builds/tries while working with UI.
Look into Phonegap to convert HTML, CSS, and JS code into a native phone app for android or iOS. Very useful as it puts a web wrapper around the web code to run it natively on your phone. This should solve storage issues as well, lots of documentation around for phonegap, be sure to check it out!
I just released http://www.protocoder.org under MIT license, give it a try! Its meant to basically do what you mention in the first point (prototype fast), and on the second avoid to learn the Android API to deeply.
Its still a young project but I hope it will grow really fast :)
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.
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.