I am beginning to look at options for cross-platform mobile development. In a couple of places I read that there are some problems with Titanium UI performance, here is a link to one of those (slide 12):
http://www.slideshare.net/bertouttier/crossplatform-tools-for-mobile-application-development
I then went to the Titanium site's App Showcase to download and test some apps to see if I noticed anything. I decided to start with the Khan Academy app since I know that they are pretty tech savvy (or assume so since their founder has 3 degrees from MIT including Comp Sci) and have some money (a few million from Google and Gates).
It only took me about 1 minute to get to a video with captions listed below the video and the first few words of the narration. I went down to the scrolling captions and tested how the gestures felt and couldn't believe that it was barely functional. Sometimes it goes in the wrong direction, sometimes it does nothing, and I cannot access the vertical scroll bar!
So the larger question I am trying to answer is potential not suitable for the Stack Overflow format...., which is: Is this one glitchy UI indicative of problems found in using Titanium in general?
More specific questions are: Why is the caption scrolling at the bottom of these videos so terrible? Is this an issue caused by Titanium? Have other people run into similiar problems with UI widgets in Titanium?
FYI - I am using an iPad 2.
If you are looking for the fastest possible UI performance, going "fully" native is probably the best overall option. Titanium offers you flexibility in that you are writing a single application with smaller changes, if necessary, across multiple platforms. It cuts your development time down significantly since you are able to share code across projects.
My understanding of the UI in Titanium is that they map to native controls on the target platform. So the performance you are seeing are native controls. The background logic of your application, the business rules, are controlled by JavaScript.
I downloaded (from iTunes) and played with the app and didn't see any issues with navigating their app. I am running it on an iPhone 4 with IOS 6. The animation flipping between between tables was responsive and the animations jumped in a predictable way. Perhaps you have a different OS version?
The Khan Academy appears to be a perfect example of an app that should take advantage of cross-platform development like Titanium. Though the app is relatively simple, it gets you access to what you need quickly and simply. This app could then be deployed on all the supported Titanium platforms, likely without any modifications at all.
Related
I'm working on a new project for a Fintech company and I have been tasked with looking into whether we should go with React Native or native Swift/Objective-C/Java for our mobile app development technology and strategy going forward.
I have done loads of research into this and have read many of the case studies relating to React Native, but I still don't feel I have enough to make an informed decision at this point.
The broad app functionality will include things like:
Data related functions such as Account Balances and Statements (pretty simple)
Image capture of identity documents and selfies of the users
Capture of biometric data
Push notifications
Some of this is pretty standard and simple, but some of it will require the app to use low level device functions and/or use 3rd party Android and iOS SDKs.
So, in terms of working towards the decision of a mobile development strategy, can I ask you for your input, based on your recent experience, on reasons to consider React Native over native Swift/Objective-C/Java development in the light of the planned functionality listed above (including reasons why it may be far better to stick with the native languages/platforms).
From own experience I can tell that React Native is a good choice for most of the apps when you need to develop and iterate fast. It usually means it would be cheaper to develop for a customer.
Looking at the list of features I can not see anything that can not be done in RN. Sooner or later you'll have to dive into native code, usually to bridge native modules with JS. I've done this multiple times, it's not that hard and documentation on RN website helps a lot.
Be aware that you'll most certainly run into stupid bugs and you'll have to find workaround. At least this happened to me multiple times when I was building RN app half a year ago, maybe now it's more stable.
Also I believe it really depends on what are the devices of potential app users. I've never developed for Android, but heard from fellow developers, that on mid-level Android devices RN runs much slower, this should be tested from the very beginning.
React Native has a really nice and tempting idea behind sounds like "unified and almost fully shareable codebase for different platforms including Web". But from my experience (not so extensive but still) the reality is a little bit different – at some point you will face some issues with native code for sure, and it would be really good if you have experienced Swift/Objective-C/Java developers in your team to deal with it. Don't trust the promises "all you need is just a React Front-End Developer". The React Native platform itself seemed to me more like a magical blackbox which I ran with a single command having no any idea what's inside and how it actually works. You have to know at least something about Xcode and Android Emulator even if Facebook is trying to hide this aspect it from you as much as they can.
TL;DR In my opinion if you really want to try React Native for something more complex than TodoMVC then you need to have at least 3 developers: Web (JavaScript/React), iOS (Swift/Objective-C) and Android (Java). Or just one Superhero.
Suppose I want to design a master detail application, Xcode6 master-detail project template for universal app includes UISplitViewController and splitViewController is new in iOS8. I want to support app for iOS7 also.
In general
What is the best way to design an universal app using Xcode6
storyboard that support both iOS8 and iOS7 ?
Is it better to use separate story board for different OS version ?
What are the best practices we should follow to make app compatible with both OS?
The 'best way' to create such an app will likely depend on what exactly your app needs to be able to do. Some ways will be better than others depending on any special behavior needed.
But it is definitely possible to use a single Universal storyboard in Xcode 6 that uses Size Classes and still target iOS 7, both iPhone and iPad, using UISplitViewController. I have successfully done just that. It did take a lot of work to ensure it worked properly and looked consistent on iOS 7 and 8. You have to be a little careful when it comes to performing the various new adaptive segues, as that is a huge difference between iOS 7 and 8. For example, detecting when you have a popover is going to require some work for the two different OSes, handling unwind segues will require some special handling, etc. It will require a lot of testing. Dedicate time to testing the iPhone 6 Plus - in landscape it will show both the master and detail on screen, but you can have control over that.
After going through that experience, I would much rather implement a single storyboard as opposed to two storyboards, one for each OS, and definitely stay away from creating a storyboard for each OS and then one for each device type.
You'll want to read up on the SDK Compatibility Guide to learn how to detect API availability. If you implement an API that doesn't exist on iOS 7 the app will crash, so you need to only run that code if that function exists for the OS the app is running on. For example, you may want to utilize the new UIBlurEffect API, but that doesn't exist on iOS 7. Gain an understanding of what deprecation means, and knowing what has changed in iOS 8 will greatly help. For example, the rotation APIs are deprecated in favor of Size Class trait collections, but those aren't available on iOS 7 so you'll need to continue to use the deprecated rotation API.
Also check out some WWDC videos from this year. They have a couple videos that discuss the new adaptive segues and Universal storyboards. Note that these storyboards ARE backwards compatible with iOS 7, but there are some size classes that aren't made available on iOS 7. See this question and the answer I provided for more information. WWDC videos from previous years also discuss how one can support multiple OSes, progressive enhancement, etc.
And of course when you have questions/problems Stack Overflow is a great resource. A lot of the questions I've posted in the past few months are related to this topic exactly, how to modify UISplitViewController behavior, obtain support for both OSes, using a single storyboard and the new adaptive segues, etc. You may wish to read through those to get an idea of what you can expect to run into when developing an app in the same fashion.
This one is a quick question regarding the possibility of having the same LnF (same look) on Android and iOS, is there an API that can provide something like this? SImilar to MAUI in MoSync or IwUI in marmaladeSDK?
Basically what I would like to do is to create my UI once for both iOS and Android using monodeveloper.
Note: Before anyone downvotes anymore, please take into account that this is a real requirement for a real project. The question is not without reason, since after looking at the documentation, I can see that Xamarin does not provide such solution, but other multi-platform SDKs do provide such solution, and since the mono ecosystem is vast, perhaps there is a third party library that can provide such functionality.
Unfortunately most of your code portability will be on the backend (non UI) when leveraging Monotouch. There are far too many inconsistencies with how an Android UI vs iOS UI are implemented respectively to their OS's.
Have you checked out http://ifactr.com/overview ? It is a paid product so I haven't tried it, but it might be at least work looking into. Other than this, no there is no cross-platform UI if you go the Mono route.
Taken directly from their page:
"But we learned that even with as much code sharing that MonoCross provides, for applications with significant UI layers, the burden of creating platform-specific UIs can be overbearing. So we created the iFactr UI abstraction layer, which allows developers to code to an abstract UI interface, and then reference our iFactr concrete implementations of that interface for all the mobile platforms, both as native UI implementations and HTML5 UI implementations.
While not a silver bullet for all mobile development, it is designed and optimized for rapidly creating data-driven UIs that enterprise users tend to demand. And because it’s integrated with MonoCross, you can mix-and-match your iFactr UI screens that are shared across platforms with screens that you can code to target specific platforms using the entire set of native APIs available on each mobile OS."
The problem is Android and iOS have different UI / UX metaphors.
Take this for example: http://kintek.com.au/blog/portkit-ux-metaphor-equivalents-for-ios-6-and-android-4/
The differences are fairly significant. If you use a development wrapper then you'll have to 100% rely on their tools. We've had experience with Titanium in the past and it wasn't good at all.
I'm about to make an application for ipad that has the following specifications:
download JSON (or xml) from server
download short audiofiles from server (locations are in the JSON from above)
save these to the iPad for offline use.
based on these files the user gets to do some exercises
user progress/results need to be saved to the device so they can continue where they left off the next time they launch the app.
My question: Can this be done with only html/css/jquery Phonegap? Or should I go native and make this all in Objective-C? Or can I combine phonegap and Objective-C?
Now I'd like to know how I can save a json file on the device for offline use.
Also I'd like to know how to download audio (or images or whatever) and save those to the device.
This can be done with PhoneGap/Cordova and its HTML5 approach.
If it is iPad only, then go native.
Your app's high level requirements do not sound too complicated. For more complex apps always consider that facebook just went native for iOS because of their performance issues. In the end, this may be the way to go for a number of apps. PhoneGap or other HTML5 or cross compiling approaches for 1000+ devices plus native solutions for the market leaders.
It depends on what level UX your are aiming for and how you think your app may expand in the future.
If you need full control over the user experience, then you will need to go native. All the physics involved in scrolling/swiping will be done for you. How much content will you have? if it's thousands of items then again native will offer the best performance. You can also perform certain tasks on background threads (my app did image compression and resizing before uploading the image, for example).
Otherwise - if you just want to get something out quick, go with phonegap.
*I speak as a developer who started out with Phonegap but went Native for performance reasons. Others may have had better experiences.
Comparing application build in native Objective-C with applications build with Webtool like PhoneGap, in terms of being fast, Objective-C apps always win, but in terms of building it fast with zero knowledge of Objective-C Web apps win.
If you have knowledge of Objective-C, in my opinion go with native Objective-C app, else do it with PhoneGap.
BTW, those functionality mentioned in your question can be done with both.
We're in process of developing a desktop application which needs to record user's screen once he clicks a button. I read a tutorial about Adobe AIR, which says it is easy to do with AIR: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/articles/air_screenrecording.html
But our preference is Titanium as we've explored it a little bit. So I want to know is that even possible? If yes, how can we get started with?
There's also an interesting solution which uses Java applet for recording, as demonstrated here: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/create?step=info&sid=default&itype=choose
But again, we're not sure about JAVA and would like to know how can it be done? or if its even possible to run a JAVA applet in Titanium?
When you say "record screen", I'm assuming you mean video. Correct?
The only way to do this in Titanium Desktop right now is to take a bunch of screenshots and string them together (encoding would probably need to be done server-side).
Depending on how long your videos need to be, this probably won't work for you. I'm also not confident in how quickly you could capture screenshots, and if it would have a high enough frame rate to be usable.
Past that, a module could be developed for Desktop to support some native APIs to record video. That's not something I see on the horizon, though.
I hope this helps, albiet a rather dismal answer. -Dawson