I am a C Sharp.NET & Silverlight developer and now thinking to swicth to SmartDevice development specially for iPhone & Andriod based phones. I have looked over web and found some cross platform development frameworks like
http://developer.openplug.com
http://www.phonegap.com/
http://android.xamarin.com/Welcome
but not sure about which to choose. Naturally I would like to keep my learning curve less but also would like to choose platform which provides more power, so I am looking for your suggestions and 'Getting Started' tips and also which device you think will be in demand in future iPhone or Android ? .
Thanks,
Maverick
I wouldn't recommend any of those. The problem is, that those "cross-platform" development frameworks, still aren't cross-compilable. This means you still need to develop an application for each platform, but you can reuse heavy calculations if you are using models af MVC.
Another thing is that those frameworks still aren't 100% native supported, so you'll loose some features from the native frameworks when developing applications.
I've read a lot of articles and to be honest, these cross-platforms seems to be dying out, cause both Android and iOS are moving very fast in each their direction and the cross-platforms cant keep up. But it's still up to you.
In would recommend you to choose one of those platform and learn it from scratch. With your C Sharp background, maybe iOS and Objective-C would be the most natural choice.
Enjoy
Edit: Regarding you last question:
I dont think it matters which one you choose, both will be domination for a long time. You should pick the one you can identify yourself with.
since you are C# dev, go for MonoTouch. I heard good things about it.
Miguel de Icaza is behind Xamrin. He wrote the most prolific .NET platform for UNIX, mono. I believe both he and his team have the capacity to bring you the most coverage for common features on Droid and iOS. My friend has a startup and is releasing an app shortly for iOS on Xamrin. It is a video streaming app.
HTML 5 will get you the most cross platform for the investment. Of course, like everyone else has said, if you need lots of native integration or if you want to use the latest APIs upon availability, you have to go native.
This isnt a Programming quest but i couldn't think of a better place to ask this question..
I recently started Developing Apps for iPhone using Objective C and Apple xcode environment.now i am quite comfortable with Objective c and iPhone SDK. But now my Company has decided to stop using XCode Environment to build apps but use Adobe Air(Flash Programming) to build apps instead and i have been asked to start Studying Flash Programming and using Adobe Air.. since i couldn't find much information regarding developers or apps build with Adobe Air anywhere i had few questions in mind which i thought someone might be able to answer here
Yes Flash will have the best animations i guess but isnt iPhone's Core Animation Framework ,use of Open GL or use of Game Engine's like Cocos2d available for iPhone good enouf if compared with Adobe Flash??
The Utility Apps can be better build with Apple's own Development Environment even if entertainment apps that dont require much development task might be a bit easy with Flash
Apple Development Environment Xcode and iPhone Sdk must have tons of better api's and features then adobe air could offer??
I have no idea how actually Flash Programming is done.. so after getting comfortable with Objective C is it really worthwhile to just let it go and start studying Flash??
IT would be really great if someone can help me with which will be the right process to develop apps for iPhone Objective C or Adobe Flash ??
The advantage of flash, as sosborn said, is that you will be able to easily port the project to Android, iPhone, and other platforms. You guessed correctly when you said that apple's environment will be able to function with less issues. By going from flash to iphone, you may have some conversion issues to fix.
If the company wants to develop for multiple platforms, then that change is totally valid and smart. If the only reason is ease of development from a graphics standpoint, ask them to look into cocos2d. If they really must use flash graphics, they can be pretty easily set up for use with coco.
I hear all this stuff about crazy ways to build iPhone apps using Ruby or C# under .NET or the like. Even stuff about developing apps on Windows using Java, or auto-generated apps using Flash CS5 or something.
Now, I've never really spent any time at all investigating these claims—I just brushed them off as clumsy or cumbersome or downright claptrap—but I'm a proud Objective-C programmer who's perhaps a little worried as to whether there's any truth in all of this?
As of the newest iPhone OS license agreement by Apple, all apps for the iPad, iPhone, iPod must be either built with XCode/ObjectiveC directly, or be built using HTML/CS/JS (With libraries like PhoneGap if desired). The Flash CS5 to iPhone cross compiler has been pretty much expressly forbidden. You can read about it from Steve Jobs.
I guess the only time those tools would be viable is in a corporate environment, where you were installing the apps directly on the phones.
I imagine that if this is possible it will soon be stamped out by Apple. They are very aggressive with their licensing terms.
As far as I'm aware, Apple is actively blocking apps developed with tools like you mention from appearing in the App store. That makes whether it is possible pretty much irrelevant.
Is there any MacOS virtual machine that can run on PC?
Is there any source to get it?
What is the best way to develop apps for iphone?
Yes all the developer tools are OSX only.
There are lots of iPhone development books out there go check out amazon and find one with some good reviews and that will get you started.
You might not, in the strictest terms, have to get a Mac to develop for iPhone; but it will be extremely helpful. Apple is relatively talented at squashing efforts directed towards Hackintoshes and virtual machines running OS X.
The shortest answer that will give you the least hassle is: Yes you need a Mac.
But, as far as I know there are a few possibilites, that try to reimplement some Cocoa Frameworks (however they might be Mac OS X only and not iPhone): GNUStep is an example.
But I don't think you get something aquivalent to Xcode (the IDE for iPhone development) this way.
And I think there are some OSX86 Virtual Machines (however these seem to be against Apple's EULA and thus seem to be clearly illegal so I won't point you anywhere to get them).
So to conclude - if you want to develop for iPhone: getting a Mac is the easiest way, even though not cheap.
Hope this helps.
The short answer is - yes.
One possibility for learning some of what you need to know before getting a Mac is GNUstep.
However, GNUstep is mainly useful for learning Objective C, especially since it provides many of the classes that the Cocoa toolkit for iPhone does. This can be run on Windows.
It doesn't, however, support some of the key 2.0 language features that are used 'all the time' in any sample code.
What it will allow you to do is design a UI using their UI designer GORM, and use a near-identical message-based system for implementing a UI, and you could theoretically write Objective C classes in GNUstep and then use them on iPhone.
However, to compile an app for iPhone you basically need to have a Mac, because then you can get the key for signing an app, etc. Since you need to get a Mac at some point, there's really little point in going the much harder route of using GNUstep first and learning a more limited implementation, unless you really need to get started before funds are available.
Despite the new SDK terms that can other programming languages, if you're really wanting to start without a Mac, I'd probably be tempted to look at something like Unity, or perhaps even Appcelerator Titanium, and figuring out all the non-platform-specific logic first on whatever platform (Unity has a free version that can be run on Windows, for example).
I'm not that big a fan of xcode, but is is far and a way the best IDE for Objective C development simply because there's almost nothing else out there.
There are, as always, other options. If you do a web app type project, you can implement the website and test a lot of it in a browser. Furthermore, since Android and iPhone browsers are both WebKit based, you can use the free Android SDK to see what pages look like on a comparable mobile device. And since you can use C and C++ classes as well as Objective C (N.B. not for the GUI, since that needs the Objective C extensions for messaging between objects), another option for making a start without a Mac would be to use Eclipse, QT Creator or some other C/C++ IDE to implement non-GUI classes, so long as you make sure you don't use platform-specific libraries.
But the end of the long answer is still that whatever you do, to compile a proper iPhone app you'll be using xcode and associated tools to finally build it and sign it, and so you need a Mac in the end. If you want to create something targetting the iPhone and won't have access to a Mac, then perhaps you're best off looking at creating an iPhone-adapted website using iui or a similar toolkit to give the site a suitable look and feel.
Hi I'm looking into iPhone development, and Objective-C is not be my preferred language. As far as I can see at this moment Ruby cannot be used to talk to Cocoa Touch at the moment on the iPhone.
So my question is, am I wrong? Can I use Ruby on the iPhone to develop Cocoa Touch applications. And what is the future looking like for Ruby on the iPhone?
Now you can with RubyMotion
In the iPhone OS, mprotect() will fail if you try to use it to mark writable sections of memory as executable. This breaks bridges like RubyCocoa (and probably MacRuby) that use libffi to create Objective-C method handlers at runtime. I believe that this is by design because it was not always the case.
Ultimately, this is more a matter of platform politics than technology, but a technical workaround for this exists. Instead of generating custom method handlers at runtime, precompile a pool of reconfigurable ones that are assigned as needed, essentially making the bridging process entirely data-driven. As far as I know, this is not yet being done in RubyCocoa or MacRuby.
Another significant thing to consider is that the compiled Ruby and RubyCocoa runtimes can be significantly larger than compiled Objective-C apps. If these libraries were available on the iPhone, this wouldn't be an issue, but for now, even if you had RubyCocoa working, you might not want to use it for apps that you distribute.
No, you are correct. Currently, and most likely for the foreseeable future, Ruby will not be an option, at least for AppStore applications. There's no reason you couldn't do this on a Jailbroken phone, but Apple is pretty wed to Objective C for official development.
You are better off as a programmer knowing a number of different languages - think of Objective-C as a good learning opportunity.
I've found that things you learn in other languages often make you a better programmer overall, and give you new insights into other languages you already know.
rhomobile is an option to run ruby code on the iPhone, but it's essentially web app development. A web server runs locally on the iPhone and your ruby code renders to standard client side web technologies (html/css/javascript).
http://rhomobile.com/
Actually, the ruby cocoa bridge isn't awkward at all; things work remarkably smoothly, right down to connecting outlets in IB etc. The resulting code is down right beautiful.
As for iPhone development, if you want an official AppStore application, you're out of luck unfortunately. Apple dictated that iPhone is Obj-C/Cocoa Touch, and there's a clause in the SDK license saying that one of the things they will reject an app for is having a language interpreter/JIT compiler, so you couldn't add a ruby interpreter in your app yourself.
Off topic, but hilariously, this is why Flash for the iPhone is Adobe blowing smoke. They couldn't get a swf player onto the AppStore even if they wanted to, per Apple's license.
Uh, Rhodes (Rhomobile) does allow you to do native apps on the iPhone and all other smartphones. Yes, we do leverage doing rendering via the WebUIView control. But we allow all device capabilities and synchronized local data.
You might want to take a look at shinycocos. It is a child project of cocos2d-iphone, an Objective-C game programming framework for iPhone.
I haven't yet played with it, but from the git README I infer that it bundles Ruby 1.9.1 into your app.
I installed the ruby package from Cydia on my iPod Touch 1G jailbroken on 3.1.3:
Seems to work.
Now as for cocoa-touch that is a whole different story I would assume.
Take a look at http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/
"Native iPhone and Android apps built with Web technologies."
Sounds good isn't it ? ;-)
No you can not create iOS native app in Ruby.
There is only two options for native apps for mac and iOS:-
Objective C and Swift Programming Language
Tutorials:-
Apple's official tutorial on Objective C
Apple's official tutorial on Swift Programing Language
If you are familiar with Ruby and only want to create iOS apps by Ruby. Ruby Motion, can be a cross-platform option for you, but it is not free.
Cross-Platforms
RubyMotion
Xamarin required .net skills
appcelerator HTML,XML,CSS,JS skills required
phonegap HTML,XML,CSS,JS skills required
I imagine it won't work right now, but I'd imagine that you'll eventually be able to use MacRuby to build iphone apps. Apple are putting a lot of work into it
Here's a link to an ADC article describing how to build normal cocoa apps
You don't have to use Objective-C to write iPhone apps. If you use QuickConnectiPhone, http://sourceforge.net/projects/quickconnect/, you can write it completely in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and still have an installable application not a web app.
If you know ruby you are probably working with JavaScript already.
To see how to install it, run it, and other ideas go to tetontech.wordpress.com
There's an open-source Ruby-Cocoa bridge you might try to get working. But I gather that there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between Ruby and ObjC that makes it a bit awkward to use.
The Ruby Cocoa bridge probably will not work. Most of the bridges for dynamic languages need to generate executable thunks (either manually or with libffi). More limited bridges (for more static languages) may not have such issues.
In either event, bringing up a bridge is probably going to require becoming more familiar with the Objective C runtime than one would just learning how to write Cocoa Touch apps, which probably defeats the point of doing it in the first place.
Currently isnt true, Apple change their policies, take a look at ShinyCocos, is a ruby bindings for the Cocos2D-iphone game framework.
https://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos
One possible solution would be to create an application wrapping for example the rice library (google it) which includes a ruby-vm. I reckon you would be able to create c++ wrappers that you could expose to ruby, thus making an environment for iphone development with ruby. This probably requires a lot of work though ^^