Does anybody know where I could find WinForms controls that mimic those on the iPhone? I am interested in doing some iPhone prototyping using Visual Studio and it would be handy if I could make the controls look like the native iPhone controls.
I know that I could just use Interface Builder on a Mac, but I do not want to do this. I just want to play around with various ideas and I will be much faster in Visual Studio.
Balsamiq Mockups has some iPhone-like controls, and you get a mock up done faster than in Visual Studio.
I've had a look around for windows forms iPhone controls for mocking and positioning items and couldn't find any. However it's quite easy to do yourself with a few screenshots from the iPhone Simulator. Below is what I've done - I'll update with a download link to the project a bit later.
As mentioned Apple probably won't like, nor let you release a product using their UI style. However for mocking there is nothing to stop you doing it in Visual Studio - they still get their $99 and appstore cut.
I use Visual Studio as I do XIB-less Monotouch development in it, and want to avoid switching back and forth. For XIB-less apps, designing with interface Builder isn't much faster in my view - but that's a Monotouch-centric viewpoint.
As I pointed out here, an alternative to doing this in WinForms might be to mock up your interface using the Briefs framework. Briefs lets you use images of any kind to represent screens of your application, and assign interaction behaviors to areas of the images. You can generate a fully functional iPhone application from this for quick testing of your user interface.
There are a number of iPhone UI wireframe elements for Photoshop and other illustration applications out there, so it's pretty easy to draw up your prototype interfaces.
Since the iPhone's UIKit controls are very likely highly protected by Apple's trademark and copyrights, I wouldn't expect to find alternative implementations. Since any iPhone development will eventually require using Interface Builder, it's worth repeating what many others have said: use the right tool for the job. Learn Interface Builder (it won't take long) and quit trying to shoehorn iPhone development into the Windows tooling.
If you are interested in doing iPhone apps in C#/VB.NET, MonoTouch is the way to go
http://monotouch.net/
To me it is weird to emulate iPhone UI in WinForms as they are two worlds apart.
You can take help of this new tool Xamarin, which helps you to create the native application by using c#.
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I am developing an App using Titanium for iPhone and Android. I created a button and a label and textfield. It looks good in iPhone but is scattered in Android.
I think I have to adjust the each of the control's position. But this would be a big overhead.
Is there any alternative mechanism there by which we can have controls correctly placed both in iphone and Android?
You should take a look at the guide for Designing the User Interface. With each new version of Titanium Mobile, the platform becomes more consistent between the various supported platforms. You really should not need to maintain separate codebases.
First of all don't go for same look and feel. iOS and Android are totally different OS. In Titanium you don't have many controls which are available for iOS.
Let the look and feel be different for Android, don't make it iPhonish.
http://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/Designing+the+User+Interface
Though their docs are not maintained properly. I would suggest you to use some cool graphics which can enhance the look and feel of Application.
I created a button and a label and textfield. It looks good in iPhone but is scattered in Android.
It should not be, post your code. The look and feel might be different, but it should not be scattered.
I want to start developing IPhone application.
I need to understand something about it - I am working with a graphic designer.
If she supplies the GUI in HTML - will it be easy for me to develop with it?
How does it work? like regular web development?
Apple uses Objective C and Cocoa for iPhone applications. Neither uses HTML; you'll instead be using interactive controls like you'd find in a desktop application. Whether it's easy for you to develop using an HTML mockup will depend entirely on your skills with Cocoa. (In the same way I encourage designers to give me mockups in Photoshop knowing that I can easily build HTML versions of them.)
You might want to start with some of Apple's documentation on iPhone development: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
For GUI development of your own apps you have several options:
Code: UIKit framework in Objective-C
Interface Builder: Tool to click
your GUI together, but the logic
will be coded like in 1 in C, Obj-C
or C++
You can build a HTML gui and
present it in a web view, but for
native apps, this will only bring
you so far.
Oh, and no native Flash on iOS. :-)
You could write an app that uses HTML for its UI - in essence you'd simply be wrapping a webkit widget and driving your app from events generated by that UI. However, that's not going to give you a UI that really takes advantage of the phone.
For that, you need to get down and dirty with Objective C and the Cocoa Touch API for iOS. Another option is using Flash CS5, which is ActionScript based.
Strictly speaking, the answer is no, your HTML skills are not transferrable.
That said, there are two projects that deserve looking into, both of which are about producing native (or "native-ish") apps from HTML and JavaScript. The first is PhoneGap, and the second (which I think is more robust and promising) is called Appcellerator.
Neither of them give you really-and-truly full access to to the iPhone API, but they do allow a significant flattening of the learning curve for people who already have well developed web app skillz.
If you go the native route, bear this in mind: it took me about a month to go from being a web developer to being a slightly competent iOS developer, and six months or so to feel solid and reliable and productive with iOS.
For web applications you can have one designer create a mockup, and then another one (Perhaps Off Shore) generate CSS, templates, themes, skins...whatever.
How can you do something similar with Monotouch?
How would it differ from what can be done in SDK workflow?
Can you use some of the same tools as for WPF/Silverlight?
(And still be like a native iPhone app).
MonoTouch doesn't use WPF or Silverlight at all. The virtual machine is similar to the Silverlight one, but that's where the similarities stop. MonoTouch uses Apple's tools for development, including Interface Builder, which is a kind of UI designer, and in theory would replace the WPF editor in Visual Studio or Blend.
In reality though, most developers prefer to simply write most or all the UI in code, because of the simplicity of the API. Designers need to work directly with the developers, not the tools, to make sure their design works and can be implemented.
When I develop in .NET there's lots of UI controls from companies like Infragistics and Telerik that enable me to build above-and-beyond standard usability and stylish GUIs rapidly. Is there anything like that for iPhone Objective-C development?
There's the venerable and lauded three20 library, but some might be concerned about use of private frameworks, which will get your app rejected.
May become useful for you as well. TouchCustoms There is more inside that described. Never had a good chance to write documentation for every small detail.
I like using Dashcode for making quick little web apps, but it specifically targets the iphone version of mobile safari, which is not acceptable for cross-platform development. I've developed a number of laundry-list hacks that I tend semi-manually add to my scripts to facilitate cross platform development (like, say, to the Android or Palm) and to perform useful iPhone tricks, like stopping the 'bounce' associated with web apps on the iphone and I'm turning these into custom Dashcode Parts so that I can drag & drop them into my project. This is mostly working so far, but here my dilemma:
How can I create a custom Inspector component to go along with my custom Dashcode Part? Is it possible? Ever heard of being done? What are the minimum steps?
I see some compiled .nib files, and an existin Dashcode Part's Info.plist has a key CYPartInspectorClass that maps to CYPushButtonInspectorPane and like CYPushButtonInspectorPane and that apparently corresponds to English.lproj/CYPushButtonInspectorPane.nib which is a compile .nib. Does this imply that everything here is semi-hardcoded, and thus impossible to add my Inspector changes?
Any pointers to the above would be helpful.
After a lot of digging, I don't think this is possible, but I'd still be happy to eventually be proven wrong.