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App Development

The Atheist

The Grammar Tyrant
The Atheist
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
36,364
Any App developers about?

I'm about to start on building a cross-platform App using Xamarin.

Now, this is all new to me, so if there's anyone around who won't mind answering a couple of what will turn out to be stupid questions, please join the thread!

Thanks.

Further info: the App is an employment assistance resource for employees. All of the work is done and waiting to be transferred into App format, and since I've been quoted ten grand to take it to both App stores, I figure I'll have a bash myself.

I had to do the same thing with .php a few years ago - learning it on the fly - and that worked ok, so I'm hoping I can replicate that!
 
Thanks!

I suspect if I travel this path I'm going to have a few questions. The problem is mostly with my coding. Using it about once every five years does not make for good skills!
 
I have a couple games out on the Apple App store. Are you developing strictly for Apple? I have only used their proprietary Xcode and worked mostly from tutorials. Mostly I'm just building on sample methods and can't say I know what's really going on behind the scenes.
 
alfaniner said:
I have a couple games out on the Apple App store. Are you developing strictly for Apple? I have only used their proprietary Xcode and worked mostly from tutorials. Mostly I'm just building on sample methods and can't say I know what's really going on behind the scenes.
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Both Apple and Android. I'll be doing Android first - vastly bigger down this end of the world.

Denver said:
May I ask, why Xamarin?
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No special reason; it just seems to have what I was after.

But I'm completely open here - if you have a better option, bring it on!
 
Ok, having spent a few days trying to work around Xamarin, I can confirm I'm just not up to the task.

Being completely unfamiliar with Apps, I'd been expecting something akin to .aspx or .php and simple instructions, but the back-door app system has me beat.

I think the time it would take me to learn what to do would be in excess of the development cost.

The only other option seems to be a pre-packed App.

Any suggestions in that regard would be great!

There appear to be a couple of useful ones at around $100/mth, which is my cup of tea, but I have no idea whether one is preferable to another, so any advice will be much appreciated!

Thanks.
 
I have a little experience with this. I took a class about a year ago where we made a couple of Android apps using Cordova. What's so great about Cordova is that the apps are made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. (Yes, these are true apps. They are standalone; they don't run out of a browser!) Since HTML, CSS, and JS are pretty standard across all devices, it makes your apps highly portable.

Cordova provides a set of uniform JavaScript libraries that can be invoked, with device-specific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries. Cordova is available for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.
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Do you know any JavaScript, or are you just looking to develop in C#?
 
Axiom_Blade said:
I have a little experience with this. I took a class about a year ago where we made a couple of Android apps using Cordova. What's so great about Cordova is that the apps are made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. (Yes, these are true apps. They are standalone; they don't run out of a browser!) Since HTML, CSS, and JS are pretty standard across all devices, it makes your apps highly portable.



Do you know any JavaScript, or are you just looking to develop in C#?
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That's my kind of language - Java and HTML. I'm on it!
 
Of course.

I can write JS for CSS, so I'm reasonably confident I can handle it. I've just been having a look around.

Sez - thanks for that; I'm checking that out, too.

Very helpful answers all round!
 
+1 for Cordova. My company has some experience in using it for small apps.

It works by building a native app as a container for your Javascript, HTML and CSS which it runs/renders in the platform's web view widget (this is all transparent to you, you don't need to worry about the details at all - much). Every important mobile platform is supported, not just iOS and Android. We also found that we could put our code on a web server and have it work as a traditional web app.
 
Thanks - it looks good so far, and I even checked out my JS skills this morning and they worked.
 
Do you really need to write a mobile App for your application? Could you instead do it all on a web site/server, and just use the browser in the mobile apps to access it?

Also, if an App, does it need to be cross-platform?

If so, PhoneGap is popular and not too hard to use.
 
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