Announcing Xamarin 3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#61

Post by noir_lord » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

natfriedman wrote: post #44

keithwarren wrote: post #38

I have been working with Xamarin stuff for a couple years now, released about 7 apps with them and honestly cannot imagine another approach. I mainly work with smaller startups in specific line of business scenarios and it has become a necessity to not only have viable mobile offerings, but they have to have parity across platforms and support both phone and tablets. When I go into a sales meeting and pitch the idea…

Thanks for the endorsement! We built Xamarin.Forms because we have lots of enterprise customers building apps with a dozen or more screens doing simple things like tabular data display and data entry, but who have a native UI requirement in their app. Xamarin.Forms should make these types of apps much easier to write quickly.

Seconding the post above, your clear moves towards the Enterprise have on my radar as soon as I have the resources to develop native mobile clients :).

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#62

Post by jordan0day » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

Xamarin.Forms looks very compelling. In a former life I was a .NET person, and so I've always kept my eye on Xamarin, but the only real mobile stuff I've done has been native cocoa touch dev on iOS.

Even though Xamarin.Forms might be a lowest-common-denominator type of thing, being able to build basically "universal" apps looks awesome.

The indie license really isn't very expensive, but I wish the starter version allowed bigger apps (but maybe stripped out publishing to app stores or something), so you could really thoroughly check it out without spending $300.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#63

Post by mkal_tsr » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:34 PM UTC

Man, as much as I'd love to use Xamarin w/ VS, 3 platforms for a single developer (myself) is $3000. It looks like a great product but wow, I can't swing that solo while bootstrapping. Have you considered a free-until-release approach? Don't get me wrong, you guys need to make money, I'm just wondering if there is a more optimal / appealing approach for those that are between Indie and Business.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#64

Post by egeozcan » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

Xamarin is great. I saw a colleague of mine developing apps with it and was simply amazed. I think it definitely deserves all they're asking for it. Just one thing though: Why do I have to pay 700$ difference per year just for VS support? Is it really that hard to integrate?

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#65

Post by wvenable » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #58

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier. Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as m…

I agree; I haven't even bothered to tinker around with the free trial. The minimum price is too high to just buy to play around with and free version is too restricted to get a feel for the platform. What I would want is the ability to do everything but distribute/publish an application (even the 24 hour binary restriction is fine).

I also don't understand why Visual Studio support isn't included in the Indie price or the free trial since I suspect the vast majority of developers who want to code mobile apps in C# use Visual Studio. So for $300 I get a sub-par product and for free I don't know anything about it.

If you aren't a mobile developer today then there's really no reason to consider Xamarin. They aren't marketing to developers who currently aren't doing mobile development but are interested in it. They should be trying to woo developers who are on that ground level so we'll buy in once we're committed.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#66

Post by benologist » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #58

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier. Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as m…

Seconded. I looked into it for games and specifically MonoGame and got blocked before I even wrote any code. Stupidest thing I've ever seen. Except for their shitty setup process with all the downloads that don't resume or retry, instead they just abort the installation for you if a single file fails.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#67

Post by rjbwork » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #58

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier. Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as m…

Can't endorse this enough. Downloaded demo sample app, got my C# T-Shirt and Monkey, trial ran out, will probably never buy.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#68

Post by Aldo_MX » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:46 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #58

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier. Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as m…

Definitely this, the linking and binary size restrictions are simply stupid, do they really expect me to try the product with only "hello world" demos?

I don't mind the timebomb in the binaries, but seriously, if you want me to take your product seriously, better let me evaluate your product with real-world apps.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#69

Post by migueldeicaza » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

revelation wrote: post #25

Awesome work! I wonder how responsive the UIs created are? The workflow looks a lot like Windows Forms (dropping elements in the editor and resize to match), and there it wasn't exactly easy to produce interfaces that could scale or even adapt. So, in short: is this more Forms or WPF? (I've looked at the subpage for Forms now, and the widgets presented there tend to lean heavily towards WPF.. so yay!)

We support a number of layout managers that allow you to create responsive UIs.

This is very important on Android since there is really no single form factor/screen resolution to target. You really need to build UIs that work on various kinds of resolutions.

Re: Announcing Xamarin 3

#70

Post by kerbs » Wed, May 28, 2014, 4:48 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #58

I tinkered around with Xamarin, and a very basic app (using some 3rd party libraries) or even using the tutorial/sample apps was immediately outside of their free tier. Now I would like to understand the logic behind the 30 day free trial. If you are preventing app distribution (binaries are only valid for 24hrs when compiled in the trial version) why restrict it to 30 days? Why not allow people to tinker around as m…

Considering it's per-developer:

Imagine an enterprise of 20 devs hacking away at various Xamarin projects with one dedicated "deploy" person. They'd get away with not paying licenses for 19 of those devs.