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Closed 11 years ago.
in the last months the development of mobile apps has become more and more a focus of mine. I already created a few apps with PhoneGap and also dived in into mobile frameworks like jQuery Mobile ans Sencha Touch.
In a next step I would like to use a mobile apps builder and I stumbled on Tiggr and Application Craft. There are probably even more.
So I wanted to ask if some people here already have experience with those two or maybe even another app builder and share it with us. As both seem to cover the same area and I am not so interested in learning them all. I would like to know if someone can tell me which is "better".
I know that there has been a big topic about PhoneGap vs Titanium Appcelerator that helped me a lot so I hope I can get some helpful answers about this topic as well.
Thanks for reading,
Marvin
I have been using Application Craft for about a month (on and off) and so far i'm really impressed. They seem to be putting LOTS of work into it: things have broken only a couple of times, never anything serious. Also, they are building really thorough documentation, etc. they host the apps for free, and they seem to be adding features etc all the time. I would bet that in a year or so they will be huge; quality services on the net tend to grow fast thankfully.
I hadn't heard about Tiggr until now. From what i can see on their site, it looks as though their free service is far inferior to what Application Craft offer. They may be worth a try too?
Hope that helps
I haven't specifically tried Tiggr or ApplicationCraft, but as you've already mentioned there are quite a few different app creation systems out there, all of which work in slightly different ways. Many, for example MobileRoadie or AppBaker, supply a series of pre-built templates that you can customise and plug together in various ways. This is great if their templates support the type of app you want, but there's often no scripting support so if you want something custom you need to pay for their developers to add the features you need, or you should go elsewhere.
If you want complete control over how your app looks and works then you should use a more IDE-like system with built-in scripting support. Things to look out for in such a system would be a good code editor, a way of immediately previewing your app inside the tools, decent documentation, support, and examples. If you're planning a cross-platform app, you'll want a system that can simulate your app running on different phone screen sizes, so you can tune your GUI appropriately.
AppFurnace is a new cloud-based app development platform that provides all of the above (I should point out that I work for AppFurnace, of course).
Tiggr Mobile is a great service! Check out thier tutorials on creating an app that will run on any mobile device at http://blog.gotiggr.com/. They've also received good press and have an impressive gallery of apps that users have created and submitted.
You should probably put NS Basic/App Studio on your list as well. It provides a complete IDE, including a 'drag and drop' interface for adding elements to your forms. The overall feel is something like Visual Studio. You can program in JavaScript or Basic. More info at http://www.nsbasic.com/app.
(disclosure: I work for NS Basic)
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm about to start building my first mobile app and wanted some direction. The app will need to:
run on iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android
access data from a database
be able to determine where it is (e.g., when I cross a state border, when I enter a city, or, generally, when I change locales)
the GUI will be relatively straightforward
After doing a bit of research, I have a few questions:
Should I use a framework (e.g., Rho, Appcelerator, or PhoneGap) or HTML5/CSS3/JS? Or, would I use both of those in combination?
I want to sell the app, so does that preclude building it as a website (i.e., HTML5/CSS3/JS)? In other words, if I build it as a website, doesn't that mean a user won't have to download it and install it like a native mobile app? I like the idea of making it a "native" mobile app vs. a website, although maybe I shouldn't.
Is REST the best way to access my data? My thought is to have a SQL Server database and build a REST service using .NET.
And other tips or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jay
If you use a tool such as Appcelerator then you the end product will be native. Appcelerator framework obfuscates the underlying native interfaces for android/iOS. There are a few instances where you'll need to know the differences between the two, for example when to use what Appcelerator class for each device, but in essence, you can write once and deploy to each device. Been using it for a while and is very nice. Appcelerator will give you all the hooks you need to tap into the devices natively.
PhoneGap will just wrap up your app and create a 'web app'. Basically a packaged website. IMO Appcelerator would be the way to go. This is more similar to your second bullet. You'll build the website, you just won't host it on a server. It will be packaged up and deployed to the device. In essence the phone becomes the 'web server' but only in the sense that the device is reading web pages that are local to the device.
As far as data, REST might be the best way to go. the calls would be quick. You may not really need to build your own DB. You might want to look and see if some of the data you are going to use is already out there. Unless you are collecting data. I don't know the details of your app so I'm not sure what help this opinion provides.
Hope this helps.
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Closed 10 years ago.
After years /decades of using tasks managers: Lotus Notes, Outlook, Palm (that was a good one), etc.. and now using Appigo, after using Toodledo, a friend of mine and me (both programmers) got tired of how far are all those from our personal GTD style and we decided to build one, something that we can customize as much as we can moving forward. We will do it open source open to public.
Appigo and Toodledo a great inspirations from a functional and technological point of view. We like the server on the cloud, the clients on browser and mobile platforms.
We have been thinking this for a while but when we saw Grails and did some of the tutorials, coincidentally on the task manager subject, we said ‘great, we can use this technology to build ours, this sounds cool’. (at least for the web part and the model, the core part).
Following Appigo strategy also, we plan to use Google App Engine for hosting the back-end.
On the mobile side, since we do not have time for hard core objective-c and stuff and we have a decent experience on Javascript frameworks we decided to use the now popular HTML5/Javascript approach and we think we decided for Sencha but any other Framework may be fine (Dojo, jQuery, etc).
Not surprisingly, our mobile and web clients will communicate with the server primarily using REST and we plan to have a server-side MVC (Grails) and a client-side MVC (like Sencha or Dojo propose)
We do not want to bother too much about databases, we love the Grails idea of creating a model-driven objects and storage.
Our project will be open source and hosted on github for anybody to use it.
Ok, here is the actual question:
Do you guys know good books or sample apps or articles that can help us go through this end-to-end. Of course we could go alone, but we will greatly enjoy going through some books, tutorials first to glue of these things together, decide good patterns to use, learn tips, experiences..etc. We do not have experience with Grails. (but a lot of java and javascript web development), of course I can find books about Grails but we want something end to end, with a good sample focusing on practices and patterns.
Basically a book or article that somehow touches part of this topic “good practices and experience building something like a task manager that runs on Google cloud platform, has the server side done with Grails and the browser and mobile clients using robust HTML5 javascript frameworks”.
Can anybody point us into this?
Thanks!
I have done a couple of engines that are build using grails + the google app engine. My experience is that you are going to have to build up the knowledge thought actually doing the work.
It's very easy to start out but once you get about knee deep there are some very interesting problems that can crop up.
Now that being said the main resources that I have found useful are the following:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596522735.do
http://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Action-Dierk-Koenig/dp/1932394842
http://www.manning.com/gsmith/
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview
The link above gives a good java over view. But you will need to be able to distill that down to groovy.
http://www.grails.org/plugin/app-engine
and finally www.google.com
but i found that most of the blogs out there are dated to earlier version of grails. And a lot of the issues they were seeing have been fix in 2.0 or are no longer issues at all.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I’ve got some apps on the cards, my target platform of choice is Android, however I’m aware that there are some SDK’s around advertising the ability to write once and deploy to multiple mobile Operating Systems. One such seems to be Marmalade.
This product in particular claims compilation to native code per device to achieve compatibility. What I’d like to know, before i commit to the price tag, or even developing outside the manufacturers intended frameworks – is peoples thoughts on the matter.
Compilation to native code would assumedly have high performance, however I am guessing there’s a tradeoff where you lose easy access to all of the API’s provided by google/apple, etc.
Looking for any other pros/cons and whether or not people who went with something like marmalade hit road blocks, wished they had not made the move.
My apps will not require a 3d engine, which seem to make up the bulk of the sample apps on the marmalade showcase. My apps will however generally want to store quite a lot of relational data & hit web services, so convenient access to sql compact would be nifty.
I work at Marmalade caveat.
The solution that we provide offers high performance because it does not rely on a virtual machine like other cross platform solutions do.
Additionally you can use native APIs directly using our EDK (Extension Developer Kit) that allows you to package up calls to native calls on iOS and Android. So you need not miss out on these.
Take a look at this blog by one of our developers who has taken his game across a whole bunch of platforms with little effort using Marmalade http://www.drmop.com/
For the last comment, we do provide sqlite support through our open source modules.
Look at Cut the Rope or Plants vs Zombies. I doubt that you need more than they need - and they use Marmalade to port games to non-iOS devices.
Regarding sql - you can use sqlite: https://github.com/marmalade/sqlite
The only trade-off is development speed. It's several times faster to write scripts in Unity and use their visual tools but you are also forced to use Unity tools and if you have more than 40K vertices visible per frame game will be slow at iPhone 3GS (10K for 3G and older).
With Marmalade in theory you should know Visual C++ but when you need some things specific to iOS or Android and no one still made library for that you have to take their EDK, native SDK and write libraries by yourself. It's not that hard and you can outsource that if you don't have time to learn new SDK.
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Closed 12 years ago.
Assuming you are trying to sell large business/government software then IE6 will be a fact of life for many years to come. If you are dealing with the UK government, NHS, or local government in the UK then IE6 support is a given.
A lot of customers will not move from IE6 as they have other web apps that will only work on IE6, they are also not willing to install other browsers for control reasons.
However I have come across cases when the customers would install Silverlight on all of their machines. How common is this?
(I am not asking if you like IE6, or if you like Microsoft, Sorry we have to many money in the world as it is today.)
Some people think this is off-topic; however as a programmer I have to decide the best technology to use when asked to create a “web app”. Most users just think of “web app” = “no need to install” and “it runs in the browser window”, so this is an important questions when planning a product.
To my knowledge, that's quite common. The main difference between Silverlight and IE7/8/9, Firefox, Chrome, etc. is that Silverlight, like Flash, is a browser plug-in the user can install by himself.
Most large businesses and government offices have an IT department managing all the machines, and the users aren't allowed to install any setup package by themselves. And if IT says it's gonna be IE6, then it's gonna be IE6, period. No IE7, no Firefox, no nothing.
However, assuming management allows the users access to the Internet, they often leave them in control of what they do with their browser, including installing plug-ins. The users then usually install Flash (essentially so YouTube works) and/or Silverlight.
The trouble is that the issue isn't usually so much "we'll install some things, but only things we think are safe", but more like "we won't install anything". The kind of organisations that are still using IE6 are the kind that are so risk-averse that you'll have a hard time getting them to install anything.
Therefore you're more likely to get satisfaction with Flash than Silverlight. The simple reason being that Flash has been around long enough that it might actually be in place on their systems already, thus negating the "we won't install anything" argument. (if they haven't even got Flash installed already, then good luck getting them to accept Silverlight)
If they are willing to install Silverlight, you might also consider trying them on the Google Frame plug-in for Explorer, which effectively turns MSIE into Chrome, but only for sites that specifically request it. The security imlications for that are pretty much the same as for Silverlight (or Flash for that matter), and if they accept it it'll mean you can write standards compliant HTML to your heart's content.
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Closed 10 years ago.
So far, most of my GUI programming has been done in C++ with the Qt Framework, I'd like to branch out a little bit and do some C# with WPF. Originally, I wanted to write something like Adium for Windows, but that seems a tad...ambitious for a starting project. I'm not even sure if you can call libpurple stuff from C#, but I'd like to find out.
However, it seems my imagination is rather lacking and I'm having trouble thinking of something that isn't either completely trivial (a text editor! a calculator! wee!) or rather hard (something with libpurple).
So, any suggestions?
I don't want to write a calculator (even if it seems a rather fitting starting project for a GUI framework)!
A long time ago I started the "Quest for the Perfect Project" with a few colleagues - the idea was that we'd try to do everything as well as we possibly could, fully test-driven etc, while learning WPF, WCF etc. We reckoned that Battleships would be a really good game. You can start off relatively simply, but there are lots of ways to extend it over time.
We never actually got anywhere with the project, mostly because we all ended up at different companies and I started writing C# in Depth, but I still think Battleships was a good game to use for learning.
Start off with a two player, single screen, local-only game, and then work out network play, AI, variations for more than two players, leagues, chat etc.
(When running as a single screen it would be seriously non-ideal as an actual game - each player would have to look away while setting up the ships to start with, and if any player wanted to see their own ships later on to get an idea of how close the other player was, that other player would have to look away. It would be great for making sure you've got a working game engine though.)
My favorite open source WPF application I've seen so far is Family.Show, a simple genealogy application that seems to use WPF really well. The source code is available on CodePlex.
(source: vertigo.com)
Try taking a look at Coding4Fun. There are a few WPF projects on there that might be of use to you, including a version of Sudoku. You can either use the articles to sow some seeds and try to develop the apps yourself, or just grab the code and pull it apart to see how it all works.
My usual starting point for these kinds of expeditions is to write a simple accounting program; money in/Money out with scheduling and graphing.
It turned out to be a pretty useful exercise when i started out with WPF because it gives you the scope for some pretty advanced stuff when you get around to visualizing the data (if you want to get fancy!) and also has a LOB edge to it meaning you're more likely to gain some commercially viable skills with it. I also used IsolatedStorage in mine which was fairly useful.
Anywho, that's my suggestion.
Make a game. Or have a look at the Silverlight Showcase and find something interesting and make it, but better.
Quite another interesting game is what Tess Ferrandez (she an escalation engineer in the ASP.NET team at Microsoft) wrote on her blog, it's a game called "Traffic Jam", similar to "Parking Lot" on the iPhone. It's written in Silverlight, but you could easily make it a Windows WPF application.
Write a spreadsheet program.