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Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#11
Nice App! Like the minimalistic interface, but you should work on spacing, font-size, colors etc. they need to be polished. Also toggle button should change state, irrespective of touch point.

Don't worry about Windows Phone, it's good for starting out, very polished tools and APIs.

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#12
From the HN guidelines: "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#13
post #8

Windows phone development isn't all that bad. For starters there isn't as much competition as Android/iOS, so the chance to become the defacto app in your category is greater. And being a big fish in a small pond can work just as well as the opposite.

I completely agree. I've also found that the relatively few users of windows phone tend to be more passionate about supporting developers on their platform, so it's much easier to get attention for good applications from the windows phone subreddit and windows phone dedicated new sites. Obviously this is due to there being fewer WP developers in the first place, but it's easy enough to take advantage of nowadays.

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#14
Jaberer, I wouldn't worry so much about the platform either. If there comes a time where you want to make an iOS/Android version, you can always try out Xamarin, which lets you use Visual Studio and C# to generate Android and iOS apps with relatively little extra effort.

I'm not related to Xamarin in any way, I'm just a fan of their cross platform mobile development solution. I'm also a student, and their academic license is only $99/year (though it will get expensive when we graduate).

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#15
post #12

From the HN guidelines: "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

It's not a commentary, OP is simply introducing her/himself.

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#16

Jaberer, I wouldn't worry so much about the platform either. If there comes a time where you want to make an iOS/Android version, you can always try out Xamarin, which lets you use Visual Studio and C# to generate Android and iOS apps with relatively little extra effort. I'm not related to Xamarin in any way, I'm just a fan of their cross platform mobile development solution. I'm also a student, and their academic li…

Hi, have you used Kivy? I code in Python and have always wanted to build mobile applications. Do you think it is good?

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#19
post #4

I am quite ignorant when it comes to Windows Phone development, mainly because it never took off how Microsoft wanted it too. Would you mind sharing the tools and technologies used to develop your app? If not here then a blog post would be fantastic, describing the process from start to end, issues you had with the tools/processes, etc. One small bit of feedback on the UI, make the background for the "Type or tap des…

Professional Windows Phone developer here.

Here are the tools/processes usually used in WP8 app development:

IDE: Visual Studio Language: C# or F# UI: XAML (WPF) and Visual Designer Deployment: Windows Phone simulator (really good) or Device Architecture: MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) with Two-Binding

If you do it right, you should be able to reuse 80-90% of the code in a Windows 8 app. With Xamarin, you can reuse 50-75% of the code on iOS and Android (depends if the app is UI-heavy or not).

I worked with native iOS (Xcode and Objective-C), native Android (Eclipse/Android Studio and Java), and Windows Phone. Microsoft has, by far, the best tools which makes building a Windows Phone app quicker than doing the same on any of the other two platforms. iOS is the second-best, and Android is the worst. Xamarin makes things a little better.

Re: Show HN: My first app – The minimalist distance-based transit alarm

#20

Don't worry too much about what platform you initially develop your app for -- if you can validate your concept then it shouldn't be hard to find assistance porting it to other platforms. Too many people get tied up on "what platform should I develop for?" when they could be spending that time getting an MVP up on _something_, validating it and getting the ball moving.

I believe he made the right decision in starting with Windows Phone. Not only is it easier to build an app on this platform, but once he validate the idea, he can easily port the app to iOS and Android with Xamarin and share at least 50% of his code with all platforms. The opposite (porting an iOS/Android app to Windows Phone) is much less trivial.
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