Feeling like it's 1980s once again!

Jim2007

So I'm an old corporate dog trying to learn new tricks....

So I've started to get into the mobile app development space for fun as apposed to economics and as I do I can't help feeling that I've regressed to the good old days....

- Hardware compatibility issues
- Operating system compatibility issues
- A couple of SDKs
- Two or three text editors
- and a lot of DREAMS, but not much else

Of course this stuff works, but it is never going to make it main stream and enable the masses to take advantage of the possibilities. So where are our Ashton Tates, Borlands et al???

Now long forgotten, but Ashton Tate's dBase made it possible for engineers, accountants, hobbyists and the so on to build basic business applications for the small SMEs and businesses they worked for.

At the same time Borland's compilers, debuggers and IDEs pushed the envelope and gave developers a productivity boost like we'd never imagined - I still remember the the day I got a peek at Turbo Pascal For Windows and was given a copy of the beta. At the time I was a hardcore C++ guy, but by weeks end I was churning out Pascal code... TPW pushed MS on QuickC and Delphi lead MS to Visual Basic and so on.

I see tremendous opportunities with this technology, but I'm having a hard time finding the innovation in the development tools space...

Apart from PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Adobe Flex, any others that are worth looking at?

Theinsideman

Jim2007 wrote: »

Apart from PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Adobe Flex, any others that are worth looking at?

Coming from a non technical background I may be able to share some insight here.

PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Adobe Flex... no one serious about app development uses these because their rubbish. Trust me I've been down that road and learnt the hard way.

Honestly native app development on Android is a breeze with the right approach, that's to say 'hit the books'

- low financial barrier to entry
- very easy to create HelloWorld apps and get started
- if you scratch the surface some truly amazing tech is fully available


Oh and I'd just like to add that the Android fragmentation argument is non-sense, if you've got fragmentation issues your doing it wrong.

Graham

Theinsideman wrote: »

Coming from a non technical background I may be able to share some insight here.

PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Adobe Flex... no one serious about app development uses these because their rubbish. Trust me I've been down that road and learnt the hard way.

Coming from a technical background I would have to disagree.

It's just as easy to have rubbish native apps as it is to have rubbish cross-platform apps.

There maybe more examples of poor cross-platform apps than there is of native apps (although that's arguable) but I suspect that's because the cross-platform tools are more accessible/approachable to an amateur 'developer' or developers working outside of their normal area of expertise

The choice of cross-platform/native is also likely to be influenced by the customer, the type of project and time/budgetary constraints.

Theinsideman

Graham wrote: »

Coming from a technical background I would have to disagree.

It's just as easy to have rubbish native apps as it is to have rubbish cross-platform apps.

There maybe more examples of poor cross-platform apps than there is of native apps (although that's arguable) but I suspect that's because the cross-platform tools are more accessible/approachable to an amateur 'developer' or developers working outside of their normal area of expertise

The choice of cross-platform/native is also likely to be influenced by the customer, the type of project and time/budgetary constraints.

Well in fairness you may have a point as im only interested in Android. The main selling point of phonegap etc. is cross platform so obviously native will be faster/more stable on a platform by platform basis.

Graham

I think one of the other main-drivers of cross-platform is familiarity. If a platform has its foundations in html/css/javascript it is very easy for a web developer to conclude that the move to mobile apps is easy.

Unfortunately the reality of this is many poor 'web developers' can now churn out equally poor mobile apps. On a similar vein, there are many drag and drop html 5 'web app' builders that democratise the production of bad apps even further.

You probably wouldn't notice the good/great cross-platform apps as they would be indistinguishable from their native counterparts.