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Yet another iOS builder....when will this end ? At the moment the only reliable solution I see for building native apps without messing with ObjC is (maybe) the

Yet another iOS builder....when will this end ? At the moment the only reliable solution I see for building native apps without messing with ObjC is (maybe) the future Macruby project. All these other solutions are just wrong, and should end. No matter how good they are they will always be one, two steps behind native apps. It will be either for lack of documentation or unsupported new iOs features etc.. To be honest, I'd rather build a web app for iPhone than use this stuff. At least I'm being honest to my users and I'm not delivering crappy apps to them. I mean, I understand why we need a standard tool, but this is the way to go, running apps on top of VM is crap. Sorry Adobe, not this time. Edit: also, is really that hard to learn ObjC ? I find it to be a very easy language to learn to be honest. Not the most pretty syntax, but it's easy.

christoph 15y ago
Firstly, i'm going to agree with you - Yes, ObjC isn't that hard to learn and people intending to distribute apps on the App Store really have no excuse for not using it. If you want to use new features (Game Center, Notifications, etc.) there is no better way. Now I have to disagree with you... There is a use case for tools like this, for me anyway - building small one off demo and kiosk type applications. I built a "small" app for a customer the other day which was a menu with 7 or 8 videos linked from it and transitions between the menu and videos., with some logging to say how many times people had viewed each video. Building this natively in iOS meant messing with all sorts of API's, handling multiple different scenarios that I really didn't and shouldn't need to care about and generally consuming far too much of my time and the client's money. Building the same application previously in Flex took me all of about 5 minutes and I suffered no performance issues whatsoever. If Adobe can deliver me a tool to do the same on the iPad/iPhone, both myself and my clients will be a lot happier for it. Don't get me wrong, i'll still need to heavily weigh up what tool to use in more complicated scenarios, but if Adobe can give me something to save time on the smaller jobs (and it works), i'll take it.
lukifer 15y ago
I've "learned" Objective-C, but I would not call it easy. Moreover, it's not just the language, but the entire toolchain: neither XCode nor Cocoa are intuitive to new developers, whether they have experience in other platforms or not. IMHO, it fails the first half of "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible". Personally, I've gone the HTML5 route, both to leverage what I already know, and to maximize compatibility with as many platforms as possible. Though I can't do everything Cocoa can do, I can still do quite a lot, while still paying deep attention to the little touches of user experience. I don't blame Flash/Flex devs for wanting to do the same with their existing skills; time will tell how those toolsets fare in practice regarding UX and performance.

christoph 15y ago

Firstly, i'm going to agree with you - Yes, ObjC isn't that hard to learn and people intending to distribute apps on the App Store really have no excuse for not using it. If you want to use new features (Game Center, Notifications, etc.) there is no better way. Now I have to disagree with you... There is a use case for tools like this, for me anyway - building small one off demo and kiosk type applications. I built a "small" app for a customer the other day which was a menu with 7 or 8 videos linked from it and transitions between the menu and videos., with some logging to say how many times people had viewed each video. Building this natively in iOS meant messing with all sorts of API's, handling multiple different scenarios that I really didn't and shouldn't need to care about and generally consuming far too much of my time and the client's money. Building the same application previously in Flex took me all of about 5 minutes and I suffered no performance issues whatsoever. If Adobe can deliver me a tool to do the same on the iPad/iPhone, both myself and my clients will be a lot happier for it. Don't get me wrong, i'll still need to heavily weigh up what tool to use in more complicated scenarios, but if Adobe can give me something to save time on the smaller jobs (and it works), i'll take it.

lukifer 15y ago

I've "learned" Objective-C, but I would not call it easy. Moreover, it's not just the language, but the entire toolchain: neither XCode nor Cocoa are intuitive to new developers, whether they have experience in other platforms or not. IMHO, it fails the first half of "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible". Personally, I've gone the HTML5 route, both to leverage what I already know, and to maximize compatibility with as many platforms as possible. Though I can't do everything Cocoa can do, I can still do quite a lot, while still paying deep attention to the little touches of user experience. I don't blame Flash/Flex devs for wanting to do the same with their existing skills; time will tell how those toolsets fare in practice regarding UX and performance.