Comments on: Cross Platform Mobile Development (iOS, Android, WP8)

By: Alex Bakman

Alex Bakman — Mon, 12 May 2014 16:12:00 +0000

cross platform can also be done with non-coding platforms like Snappii

By: jsonmez

jsonmez — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 03:54:00 +0000

Wow, that for sharing that. I had no idea about that technology. I’ll have to check it out. Can’t believe I never heard of it before.

By: Andy Dent

Andy Dent — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:28:00 +0000

Another important cross-platform option similar to Xamarin is fairly new from RemObjects – “Hydrogene” aka “RemObjects C#” http://www.remobjects.com/elements/hydrogene/

This came to my attention via the iDeveloper Live podcast by Scotty, a podcaster of significant repute and long-term membership in the iOS world. He is now working for them doing work such as tutorial videos.

Both require doing a native UI.

The interesting difference between RemObjects C# and Xamarin is that whilst both are programmed in C#, in Xamarin you are coding to the .Net model where RemObjects does compile-time mapping to native types. This means you can share RemObjects collections with native code at no overhead. I think it also translates to smaller native apps than having the .Net libraries of Xamarin included.

Coding in Hydrogene is also a little easier as a transition from Objective-C as they extended the language slightly to allow for multi-part calls.

myString.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString(aString) withString(bString);
like the Objective-C
[myString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:aString withString:bString];

This wordy style may cause some C# programmers to scream but will mean a lot easier porting of iOS code examples.

By: jsonmez

jsonmez — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 02:28:00 +0000

In reply to Bhavesh Patel. Good points, thanks for the contribution.

By: Bhavesh Patel

Bhavesh Patel — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 20:50:00 +0000

HI John, The two most appealing advantages using xamarin for cross-platform application development in my mind are
1. Leveraging C# development skill and
2. Delivering Native UI
It sucks that a developer needs to have some level of knowledge for different platform specific UI library but if an app is not delivering native UI it may fall short in competition. If your audience is captive it doesn’t matter though.
You also need two machines Mac and Windows in addition to xamarin different tools licenses. For small organizations cost of hardware and software could be a problem.
All approaches we have today out there are having pros and cons and I hope the gap b/w native and hybrid UI narrows over the time.

By: kynao

kynao — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 02:29:00 +0000

As alternatives to Xamarin, you also have Windev mobile or Delphi

By: jsonmez

jsonmez — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:59:00 +0000

In reply to Niklas Therning. Yes, good point.

By: Niklas Therning

Niklas Therning — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 16:07:00 +0000

If you don’t care about WP8 you could use Java – Google’s native tools for the Android app and RoboVM for the iOS app. RoboVM essentially does the same as Xamarin.iOS does but for Java and other JVM languages. It’s a work in progress but slowly getting there…

By: Anand_Patel

Anand_Patel — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 20:07:00 +0000

John i am with your suggestions but for xamarin also we need to have knowledge of all 3 device platform. Which in case of HTML5 is not at all. Infact HTML5 also cover the web app desktop platform with responsive design. So i will suggest we should apply more efforts to make HTML5 more stable and robust as early as possible for mobile devices.