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Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

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71–80 of 84 posts

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#71
Advice: get OUT of the UI/UX business, it's an ever-changing grinder. Unless you enjoy relearning 50 Shades of the Wheel every 3 years, bail fast and quick. It's getting worse over time, not better. An alternative may smaller internal applications where they care less about latest-and-greatest UI's. It still changes, but not as fast.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#72

This is exactly the vision we have for Ionic and where we are taking it. One app that works great in the app stores and when deployed on the web (or even electron), built entirely on standard browser technologies. If you are put off by Angular, our v4 release (alpha right now but quickly heading into beta and then production ready) was rebuilt on top of web components and is framework agnostic. It also happens to be…

Not sure about the speed benchmark, but Stencil's build process could be improved. It takes more than 1s to build on file changes. Definitely not ideal for development.

Vue.js PWA, on the other hand, rebuild quite fast.

With that said, I really like Ionic PWA and the component approach. Will wait for the stable release.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#73
Hello all! My name is Michael Arnold and I've recently launched a new product App Pile ( www.apppile.com ) , which is currently under a private beta release. App Pile converts Axure designs into native Android & React Native projects complete with source code. Not just source code, but readable, editable, expected code. As mentioned, it is a beta release which means the native Android offering has a stable build while the React offering is nearly complete and should be done in the next week or so. (But is still included with every download) Axure is a design program similar to Invision/Sketch/Marvel and recently created a plug in which lets you import Sketch projects, so defacto App Pile works for Sketch as well. Please check out my latest post which explains the product in a little more detail. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/app-pile-take-away-work-from-...

If you have any questions or would like a free trial code, please email me directly at michael@apppile.com

Happy Coding!

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#74
post #72

This is exactly the vision we have for Ionic and where we are taking it. One app that works great in the app stores and when deployed on the web (or even electron), built entirely on standard browser technologies. If you are put off by Angular, our v4 release (alpha right now but quickly heading into beta and then production ready) was rebuilt on top of web components and is framework agnostic. It also happens to be…

Not sure about the speed benchmark, but Stencil's build process could be improved. It takes more than 1s to build on file changes. Definitely not ideal for development. Vue.js PWA, on the other hand, rebuild quite fast. With that said, I really like Ionic PWA and the component approach. Will wait for the stable release.

I was referring to runtime performance. Our build process will probably be slower than vue because we're using typescript, but we do have plans to speed it up. I've been using it for a large app and barely notice rebuilds, so I think we're almost there.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool app! I got a little confused as to how to add songs once you're a DJ, but the whole things looks cool, and you seem to have a nice community already!

Thanks! Please join in :) Also, thanks for the feedback I actually keep getting similar comments that it's a lot to learn all. I'm currently trying to simplify things. To add a track you just add it to your "queue" by searching and clicking the plus icon, then when it's your turn (your UN is all the way to the left) your track will play for everyone. Assuming you figured it out but just FYI

I went as far as having the track in my queue "on the deck" but couldn't see it in the global playlist or when it would be playing.

It's super fun because I tried to make a music app to make collaborative playlists on steroids but my UX is so lacking. You can check it out at http://www.niche.fm

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#76
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it handle Electron apps? I thought playing with EXPO was a limited venture?

I'm currently developing with Expo with plans to expand to Electron (though I haven't written anything for Electron yet, just the React-Native and Expo portion) but my theory is that once you have the core React functionality down (The API endpoints, Reducers and Actions (if using redux), and general component structure) then porting to Electron will be fairly trivial. React-Native has a lot of cross-over with React…

Expo/create-react-native-app experimentally support the web now, so you can build both from one codebase. My PR to that effect was recently accepted. See my blogpost[1] about it.

[1] https://medium.com/@ron.arts/web-support-for-create-react-na...

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#77
I'm using flutter [1] which uses the dart programming language. I'm loving the static typing of dart, hot reload of flutter, very good debugging tools. Also the fact that layout/ui and logic are all laid out in code and not in a separate markup lang

1. https://flutter.io

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#78

Consider taking a look at the Visual Studio tools, which have really matured over the last few years: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/features/modern-web-tooling/ Specifically, tools for Apache Cordova: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/features/cordova/ (disclaimer: I haven't used them, but I've heard very positive feedback)

1) The Microsoft development product line is great at some things, but not for directly enabling cross web/mobile solutions. However do use VS Code as the environment for other solutions mentioned here. 2) If you are a non-MS person, make sure you don’t miss out on the greatness of Visual Studio Code by dismissing it as yet another Windows centric product. VS Code is world class performant, has a great plugin arch/ec…

They should have just called it (Microsoft) Code. If they can use Word, Access, and Excel as product names, surely they could get away with just calling their world-class editor "Code".

I second your recommendation, I'm a sucker for a sleek editor with a great plugin architecture.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#79
post #77

I'm using flutter [1] which uses the dart programming language. I'm loving the static typing of dart, hot reload of flutter, very good debugging tools. Also the fact that layout/ui and logic are all laid out in code and not in a separate markup lang 1. https://flutter.io

Would you care to comment on runtime performance of the finished product? I've played around with Flutter a bit and get the impression that it's still a little too heavily skewed toward Android in terms of optimization. I guess I can't fault a Google-built framework for that, but I could never sell Flutter to upper management if I have to say, "well... it's a little janky on iOS."
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