Can anyone comment on Xamarin learning curve? If I have experience in both iOS and c#, how much time does it take to get up to speed with Xamarin?
Just imagine writing code in c# instead of obj-c.
It is 1:1
Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#52can you develop iOS apps in a windows environment without any mac machine? is there a cloud build service for mac that you can integrate?
No.
Xamarin stuff obeys others: Apple says no dev w/o Apple hardware
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#53Is it possible to do logic code in Xamarin and develop UI natively for each platform?
That's actually the way Xamarin works the best - you usually don't develop UI natively, but use Xamarin's wrappers for native UI elements for each platform separately. They're not all that compatible when it comes to UI and UX anyway.
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#54Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#55My experience with Xamarin: I've been working for half a year with Xamarin Forms. I Think using Xamarin is the way to go, there is no need to re-code something for 3 different platforms when you can just have a shared codebase. Tools like Cordova and Phonegap don't work. They produce a very crappy experience that doesn't use the native OS functions, doesn't look and feel native, feels slow and has many bugs (for exam…
Our app Pacifica (http://thinkpacifica.com) is built with Cordova and the Ionic Framework. It's far from a crappy experience. I think that too often people pick these frameworks and assume that it's a substitute for good design. You still need to put in the effort.
There's also the fact that the bar is a bit lower to get an app finished and released with something like Ionic. So you might see more apps that aren't quite up to par, but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to create something beautiful with them.
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#56Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#57Having been building a decent size app (tens of thousands of lines) in Xamarin this really reflects our experience. One particular point is that the memory management is fairly complex under the covers with bridged objects and multiple memory management mechanisms working in parallel, this occasionally rears its head. Another important point is they do provide a single automation test framework that targets both plat…
I wonder if RubyMotion is much better when it comes to memory management. According to the website, RubyMotion objects are platform native objects (ObjC objects for iOS/Mac, java objects for Android), so each platform's native memory management scheme applies, rather than having two GC's or GC plus reference counting. I'd probably use RubyMotion for an upcoming project at work if it had a port to WinRT for Windows un…
Here's a recent extensive benchmark against popular cross-platform toolkits: https://medium.com/@harrycheung/cross-platform-mobile-perfor... (including memory usage)
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#58Great article, we have a similar story but only used Xamarin for 1 iOS app. If I had option to go back I would not chose Xa marin, we would have used native. Main reason being that we now need to add 3 SDKs to our app and none of them are supported in Xamarin, it seems it will be cheaper and more predictable to rewrite to native than implementing SDKs. Porting libraries to Xamarin is possible in theory but in practic…
Hi there, I'm the CEO of Xamarin. I'm really sorry to hear that you had issues with consuming third-party libraries. This is actually something we've been recently very focused on improving. First of all, in December we released a new tool called Objective Sharpie that can automatically bind Objective-C libraries into C#: http://forums.xamarin.com/categories/ObjectiveSharpie If you're skilled enough to build the Obje…
ObjectiveSharpie is awesome! No problems so far.
But when are you gonna let us use Xamarin Studio on Linux?
Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#59Great article, we have a similar story but only used Xamarin for 1 iOS app. If I had option to go back I would not chose Xa marin, we would have used native. Main reason being that we now need to add 3 SDKs to our app and none of them are supported in Xamarin, it seems it will be cheaper and more predictable to rewrite to native than implementing SDKs. Porting libraries to Xamarin is possible in theory but in practic…
Hi there, I'm the CEO of Xamarin. I'm really sorry to hear that you had issues with consuming third-party libraries. This is actually something we've been recently very focused on improving. First of all, in December we released a new tool called Objective Sharpie that can automatically bind Objective-C libraries into C#: http://forums.xamarin.com/categories/ObjectiveSharpie If you're skilled enough to build the Obje…
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Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you're dealing with trade-offs unless you have unlimited resources. If you want an iOS, Android and web app as soon as possible with a decent UI on a limited budget, PhoneGap is hard to compete with. If you want the slickest possible iOS UI, native is likely the way to go but it costs significantly more resources if you want to support other platforms as well. You're not getting anything for free and you have to…
Sure, I'm not disputing tradeoffs. > If you want an iOS, Android and web app as soon as possible with a decent UI on a limited budget, Your chances of business/users/engagement success quickly dwindle if that's the rationale.
So how would you rate a PhoneGap UX compared to a native UX? I agree the latter is better but I don't see the former as significantly worse. If you have limited resources, you've usually got the choice between supporting multiple platforms with a decent UX or a limited number of platforms with a great UX.