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I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. Also if you are developing a game, you'd

I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. Also if you are developing a game, you'd better stay far away from UIKit and do everything in OpenGL if you hope to get the same type of performance on Android using a translation tool. The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a mess.

glassx 13y ago
There's an App Showcase on Xamarin's website: http://xamarin.com/apps http://xamarin.com/apps Out of those, I use Rdio daily and played Bastion a lot and they work great. I didn't know they were made with Mono until now.
coldtea 13y ago
>I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. I don't know, what's bad about these http://xamarin.com/apps http://xamarin.com/apps , e.g. Rdio which I've used and is fine? Xamarin is a binding to Cocoa and other libs, it doesn't recreate any UI itself. So the "don't come close to natively built ones" doesn't even make sense from a technical standpoint. Not to mention that C# is compiled AOT. >The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a mess. The article isn't even about those people in the first place. He even laments that "UX-quality bar on mobile is high" as a reason why mobile sucks.
tluyben2 13y ago
Xamarin and Phonegap are completely different beasts. You are thinking about Phonegap now. Xamarin ones are natively built ones; you use Apple classes to build everything but just in C# instead of Objective-C. So you have to rebuild the frontend twice indeed for Android and iOS but it does look and function 'native' as if you did it with Xcode. Phonegap => not so much; most just works like shit, but you only have to build once for a lot of platforms. It's a big reason for the proliferation of extremely bad apps in the Play store though; just wrapping of a website or form and putting it in as app.
- weixiyen 13y ago
  Sorry, I got Xamarin confused with Titanium, which was a pretty bad experience for me for the week that I tried it. If I tried to do anything fancy, it was completely useless. Also any time you are using 3rd party tools like Titanium / Xamarin to develop these apps it comes with gotchas / limitations that may not even be worth it in the end (it seems like Xamarin has less gotchas). The main issue is that you still have to do UI twice in the end (iOS & Android), and one more time for web.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Sure, but there aren't really any alternatives. When you build advanced apps HTML5 is depressing for apps at the moment. It will happen, but not this year.
andyjohnson0 13y ago
Which Xamarin apps that you've seen don't look native? As others have pointed out, Xamarin provides C# bindings for the native APIs. It is fundamentally different to Phonegap, which takes a lowest-common-denominator Java/Swing approach.

glassx 13y ago

There's an App Showcase on Xamarin's website: http://xamarin.com/apps http://xamarin.com/apps Out of those, I use Rdio daily and played Bastion a lot and they work great. I didn't know they were made with Mono until now.

coldtea 13y ago

>I want to see some good Xamarin & PhoneGap apps, honestly the ones I've seen don't come close to natively built ones. I don't know, what's bad about these http://xamarin.com/apps http://xamarin.com/apps , e.g. Rdio which I've used and is fine? Xamarin is a binding to Cocoa and other libs, it doesn't recreate any UI itself. So the "don't come close to natively built ones" doesn't even make sense from a technical standpoint. Not to mention that C# is compiled AOT. >The article is pretty much spot on. For most people who want to write great software, the client side is currently a mess. The article isn't even about those people in the first place. He even laments that "UX-quality bar on mobile is high" as a reason why mobile sucks.

tluyben2 13y ago

Xamarin and Phonegap are completely different beasts. You are thinking about Phonegap now. Xamarin ones are natively built ones; you use Apple classes to build everything but just in C# instead of Objective-C. So you have to rebuild the frontend twice indeed for Android and iOS but it does look and function 'native' as if you did it with Xcode. Phonegap => not so much; most just works like shit, but you only have to build once for a lot of platforms. It's a big reason for the proliferation of extremely bad apps in the Play store though; just wrapping of a website or form and putting it in as app.

weixiyen 13y ago
Sorry, I got Xamarin confused with Titanium, which was a pretty bad experience for me for the week that I tried it. If I tried to do anything fancy, it was completely useless. Also any time you are using 3rd party tools like Titanium / Xamarin to develop these apps it comes with gotchas / limitations that may not even be worth it in the end (it seems like Xamarin has less gotchas). The main issue is that you still have to do UI twice in the end (iOS & Android), and one more time for web.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Sure, but there aren't really any alternatives. When you build advanced apps HTML5 is depressing for apps at the moment. It will happen, but not this year.

andyjohnson0 13y ago

Which Xamarin apps that you've seen don't look native? As others have pointed out, Xamarin provides C# bindings for the native APIs. It is fundamentally different to Phonegap, which takes a lowest-common-denominator Java/Swing approach.