Cross Platform for Mobile Apps - cross-platform

i'm going into a real big project for building cross platform mobile application.
and i want to know what IDE should i use or what platform. and i would prefer if i could use a platform using html,css and js cause i have some experience in them. but if the platform doesn't support them it's okay if it's a VERY GOOD one
Main Features of the App:
it will have a chat feature(Messaging).
-Notification Center (Notifications for friend requests,updating statuses..etc)
Viewing categories for a certain place with its members and activities in this place.

Look into using PhoneGap. all you will need to know is Html, CSS and JQuery for a start.
All this techonology requires for you to do is write one set of code which you will be able to convert to multiple platforms (iOs, Android, Windows etc), no need to write independent codes for each.

Related

VB.NET Cross platform app

I make a game using vb.net & wpf. But I want this run on Windows/Linux/Mac.
How can I do it?
I'm sorry my english is really bad :D I use Google translate.
Implementing a solution for multiple platforms is not an easy task and you need to be familiar with all the platforms you plan to support, starting with trivialities such as different path schemes and ending with checking every reference you require by your project settings for its compatibility to the target platform.
Please have a look at http://www.mono-project.com. When you install the mono package to your system, you can run your compiled .exe as it is from the shell under certain circumstances.
Obviously, you need to decide whether you try to create one application that runs on all target platforms OR if you want to create platform specific applications all referencing to the same game engine.
If you stick very close to the framework not using external references, chances are higher to achieve the former. If the main logic of your game can easily be compartmentalized into a dedicated project, the latter is the way to go.
In general, cross-plattform compatibility is more easily to achieve if your application backend consists of a console application to be accessed by a webbrowser installed on the system - using a web frontend though. But as long as you do not require accelerated graphics, this should be feasible.

unity platform for apps

I am considering making a small app for desktop pc's. I would mainly like to have support for mac and for ubuntu (linux) and I wouldn't mind support for windows as well. An easy way seems to develop an app using Unity, but it is more known to be an engine for games.
To my simple logic, there should be no reason why an app cannot be built with Unity. A platform that features the ability to create massive laser marine gunbattles should be capable of rending pretty buttons and a user interface. The plus side is that with unity you can port to all platforms that I would like this app to run on as well.
Am I making a bad assumption? Are there any people that have done such things? The app I would like to make might be open source, does the Unity platform limit me in any way here?
You are correct in your reasoning that it is possible to make a normal app with Unity, but this of course is not what Unity was intended for. It is geared towards rendering and updating scenes (including physics, game logic, etc.). If you do not need the notion of scenes in your app, then you will add additional complexity to your development and run-time overhead that you would not normally need.
Another drawback is that you will need to abide by Unity's licensing with your app which may or may not be an issue for you (https://store.unity3d.com - See links at the very bottom for other special licenses, such as for gambling).
Since you mentioned Unity specifically, it uses Mono for some of its run-time support across platforms. Perhaps you want to consider using just Mono and associated tools instead (http://www.mono-project.com).

Compatibility of titanium and TideSDK

As far as I know TideSDK is what used to be Titanium Desktop, right?
I'd like to ask if somebody has experience in reusing (mostly the business logic and data access) components of Titanium mobile in TideSDK?
Ive developed for both and in my experience Titanium for mobile and TideSDK are fairly incompatible at this point.
This is one of the reasons Appcelerator open sourced the project and stopped working on it. It was diverging so much from their company goal of a robust mobile API that it did not make sense for them to work on it. The API's at this point are very different, as well as the technology and workflow, across the dev stack from UI to business logic, to data access, to backend.
The only parts I was able to reuse were pure JavaScript utility files, and the Titanium local DB access scripts.
You can use most of your javascript code within TideSDK without much modifications. There is fundamental difference between various UI components on Desktop platforms and Mobile platforms. Taking example .. in desktop your application have window..and u can have separate UI Items like system tray, taskbar etc. whereas in mobile you would generally control the entire screen and various UI components are very different than desktop.
This is why you need to implement the native interfaces in desktop and mobile separate way but most of the business logic would remain unchanged.

Localization Testing Tool For Localized Mobile Applications (Android , Iphone , WP)

Is there any Tool Available in the market to test the localized mobile apps under different locales.
Like, the Typical Tests performed on localized mobile apps will be ..
1)Application functionality - For basic navigation
2)String Truncation Validation
3)Validate the translated Symbols and Images must be appropriate to the Target Language
and so on ..
Please provide me your valuable information on this ..
Really thankful to you..
I have some experience using Robotium to automate the localization testing of our mobile applications.
The main thing you want to look for in any automation solution for localized applications on any platform, is the ability to uniquely identify each object you will need to interact with (buttons etc.), using an identifier that will not change on different locales. That way, your automation code will run on any locale (we would not want to have a different code base per locale).
In my experience, it's much quicker to develop a Robotium (Java based) solution for automated testing of Android applications (other solutions such as SeeTest exist, but I have not found it great).
QTP I've found to be very useful for desktop applications, but not mobile. Selenium is good for automating web applications, and you can use Selenium Mobile to interact with the browser on a mobile device if you need to.
I blogged recently detailing how we use Robotium to test our Android application, and my experiences using it, you can find this at the link below.
Automate your Android App Testing Using Robotium
When testing your application on the devices and networks that it’s intended for, carrying out user acceptance testing in the target market could highlight any market-specific concerns and return some very useful market specific feedback. Consider a beta (test stage) program, customer early-adopter program or work with a company like ICanLocalize who use only translators that translate into their native tongue.
If, for example, your global mobile app implements its own pop-up touchscreen keyboard, you should consider the needs of your international users to ensure that they can enter text in their native script. While mobile devices and smart phones are being shipped with increasingly higher screen resolutions, usability and aesthetics need to be considered too. Translated text can often expand by as much as 25 percent, affecting the layout and visual appeal of your app. Some scripts may be very difficult to read if the displayed font size is not sufficiently large.
There are more things to consider when localizing an application and I’m not talking about plain old translation of code here. Any company hoping to win over an international audience can make this job significantly easier by planning ahead for the translation process:
Think carefully about words used to describe menus.
Get a native-language linguist to test your application
Avoid colloquialisms
Consider navigation.
http://www.icanlocalize.com/site/2012/10/planning-ahead-for-translation-when-developing-a-mobile-app/

How to create a cross-platform smartphone application?

I am new to smartphone application Development, I have worked with .NET web and Windows Forms applications and only used the C# language.
I am planning to make a simple application which can run on all mobile OSes, like BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android phones, iPhone, etc. On searching I found that all have different OSes and uses different languages. I can use the C# language and .NET since I am aware about it. After some thinking, is it possible to make a web-based application using normal website coding but make it work like an application?
Please suggest some method to make a application which is possible to run on all smartphones. What technology or tools can be used for developing it?
The best approach to create truly cross platform app is to use HTML5 and JavaScript. All the other options will be painful. However, of course you can't access all the features with these web applications.
One interesting framework for creating HTML5/JavaScript based apps is PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/). It has quite many API's available and wide support for different platforms. (Note that browser performance varies between devices so make sure not to add too much effects and glitter)
For native apps, there's no that many frameworks but one interesting is MoSync (http://www.mosync.com/)
There can be multiple approaches to create a Cross Smatphone plateform apllication.
If you want to code just once and want to to run on multiple enviroments without any change you must go for some javascript/HTML5 bassed solutions. One that I work with is NGCore. It is a development framework that allows games to be authored in JavaScript but with native application performance by leveraging ngmoco's ngCore libraries.
Other approach that will best suit your needs is to go for a Environment like MonoTouch. Its C# based and AFAIK you can use most of the .net API in MonoDevelope. It lets you reuse most of your code on another environment.