phone app dev software

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28 Jan 2005
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Hi all,

Ill prob sound like an idiot here as I dont know what im talking about - am asking for a mate...

They have used some software to create an iPhone app - record results for their phd study and they wanted to port it to android but said its a dev/licencing cost of over 300 quid? Assume its software + license she is looking at buying. This sound right? There nothing free?

Ta,
Achilles
 
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she was looking at "livecode", this any good/something to avoid?

Avoid it. I had someone come to me with an iOS app they had created with it, they had spent over a month developing it in LiveCode and the results were terrible. I took it and managed to replicate the app natively in 5 hours with better results.

All of these cross platform development tools promise the world but I've yet to see a single one that comes close to yielding satisfactory results. Go native or a website, or don't do it at all.
 
Soldato
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All of these cross platform development tools promise the world but I've yet to see a single one that comes close to yielding satisfactory results. Go native or a website, or don't do it at all.
I create mobile apps in C# using Xamarin, it's awesome. The only downside it you still need a Mac to create the UIs on and build iOS apps with. Android and WP you can build straight out of the box.
 
Soldato
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Phonegap is good unless you need to get access to internal functions like calendar for example. For android there is a plugin but i didint find one for iphone when I was looking to do something with it, but if you want to simple display/store/process some data, phonegap is actually pretty easy to use.
 
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I create mobile apps in C# using Xamarin, it's awesome. The only downside it you still need a Mac to create the UIs on and build iOS apps with. Android and WP you can build straight out of the box.

I agree that it's probably awesome for simple generic apps, but for doing something more serious you need to be able to get past those layers that these solutions provide. Using the correct technology for each platform is vital to creating a great UX, something generic can never beat native for serious development.
 
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