Other Software > Developer's Corner

Cross-platform mobile apps development: MonoTouch/MonoDroid, Marmalade, etc.

(1/3) > >>

Armando:
I'm looking at the various options for cross-platform mobile apps development, reading forums and various articles (Mobile application development).

The C#/.Net way with MonoTouch/MonoDroid is attractive... but then Marmalade looks nice too. There are also other interesting options like Rhodes.

There are of course several parameters to consider (familiarity of language, price, development speed, etc.). But I don't want to clog the discussion right away...  :-[

Any opinion/"hands on" experience on the matter ?

Armando:
Nice (older) post on MonoTouch and Objective C on stackoverflow. Is MonoTouch worth the cost or should I just learn Objective-C?

Eóin:
I'm using Marmalade to develop a game, I started back when it was still called AirPlay SDK. Being primarily a C++ coder I wanted to stick with the language and Marmalade allowed me to do that and avail of many of the Boost libraries too (not all though). The whole build once, then deploy to any platform really does work too, it is a fantastic dev environment.

BUT... a 2nd app I'm working on really requires a good UI, and I'm a stickler for wanting my applications to have the "native feel". Marmalade claims in a future version (the next version even) that it will support native UIs. I didn't have the luxury of waiting to see how that turns out so I opted to write a portable C++ core and glue it to separate Android/Java and iOS/ObjC user interfaces.

The type of app you want to develop is important, how much OS integration will you want?

mahesh2k:
Maybe off topic but have you checked Sencha Touch ?

Renegade:
Marmalade looks very nice! Rhodes looks interesting as well.

However, don't buy into hype for any dev tools. Whether that's MonoTouch/Mono for Android or Marmalade or whatever. At some point you WILL encounter obstacles that must be solved at the native level. You need to have flexibility there to solve those problems, and not all SDKs or toolkits will let you do that.

Whether that's at the UI level, or being able to open a media file (which you CANNOT do on iOS in a sane manner)... Those problems crop up when you least expect them.

Whichever toolkit you choose, just make sure that you're comfortable with it.

To be honest, I think I'd go with a C~ish language if I were to choose again. (I use the Mono toolkits.) A lot of mobile kits are basically just high-level scripting languages with little possibility to do much other than line of business applications (which they are designed for). Marmalade looks very nice there as it would also let you easily move to other C-based SDKs like bada.

I know that the edge-case problems that I've seen have been solvable in MonoTouch, and I expect that it would be the same with Marmalade. I'm not sure about Rhodes though -- I'm not very familiar with Ruby.

Do post back though when you choose, and any thoughts or opinions you develop. I'd be interested to hear.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page