Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use • Hacker News Board

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#81

Post by aliakhtar » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

beermann wrote: post #55

Avalaxy wrote: post #14

My 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…

I gave your app a try. I think its fairly good. It was a -bit- choppy when clicking on sign up, but once signed in, I couldn't tell it apart from a native app. The 'swipe to move to next screen' was pretty good too.

Cheers.

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#82

Post by discreteevent » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #27

discreteevent wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the commercial version of Qt would have covered what you needed? I would also be interested I'd anyone else here is in a position to compare Xamarin and Qt. It's very hard to compare the two from the outside. Thanks.

Xamarin and Qt are very different. Xamarin provides a managed runtime environment (Mono) and a way to call native iOS and Android APIs from that environment. Xamarin Forms builds on top of those things to provide a cross-platform UI toolkit that uses the native controls on each platform. Qt is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that draws its own controls using each platform's low-level graphics facilities. As such, the co…

Thanks for that. The application I'm looking at has a very specialized ui. The functionality also counts for much more than native look and feel from the customers point of view so Qt might still be a runner.

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#83

Post by yulaow » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #58

natfriedman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I fear never. We made this question over and over on the forums or via emails but the answer is ever the same: "we have no plans to support linux". Originally the problem was about "there are too many linux distros!", then when some people suggested to at least support ubuntu as Valve did (and correctly considering the big part of used distros are ubuntu based or related) they went again on "we have no plans to support linux" without futher explainations.

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#84

Post by madeofpalk » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 2:19 AM UTC

iLoch wrote: post #71

Avalaxy wrote: post #14

My 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…

> 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 example they can't use the hardware back button). Have you taken a look at Facebook's new framework, React Native?

Just to be clear (for you or anyone else), React Native is nothing like Cordova or Phonegap - Using Javascript, you instruct React Native to draw native components (UINavigationBar, UIButton etc) with native interactions.

The end user is not touching HTML and CSS. They touch native components with native performance.

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#85

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

JamesMontemagno wrote: post #25

Avalaxy wrote: post #14

My 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…

Hey there, I am James Montemagno a developer evangelist at Xamarin. I have been developing native apps with Xamarin for nearly 4 years now across iOS, Android, and of course Windows (I was a customer for 2 years before joining Xamarin). I just wanted to clarify a bit about Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. It is important to know that Xamarin.Forms is a cross platform UI layer that sits on top of the core Xamarin platform.…

Hi James,

What would be the best way to do 2D graphics using Mono? I have an editor project written in WPF, but mostly uses 2D APIs (since...I'm building my own editor, some videos here [1]). Anyways, my only Windows platform dependency is WPF (most of the magic is platform independent), and I'm wondering how to make my app cross platform. The most appropriate I can find is mono.cario, but it doesn't seem to be very active.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#86

Post by themothaship » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 3:53 AM UTC

http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/comment/30355

This to me sums up my experience with Xamarin. It has A LOT of potential, and I did generally enjoy working with it. However, the amount of small issues I dealt with that were never solved (and still haven't been solved 2 years later) are what drove me away. That and the cost...

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#87

Post by themothaship » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 3:56 AM UTC

taspeotis wrote: post #66

radiofan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst it may require more work than Xamarin Forms, MvvmCross is a way of creating cross-platform applications using Xamarin without any of the issues you've documented above.

I have helped ship two commercial apps with MvvmCross and it works pretty well.

MvvmCross is pretty legit. I felt that it really made Xamarin worthwhile. I found it quite a bit easier to keep the platform specific code to a minimum and when I needed to write it it was abstracted out as much as possible.

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#88

Post by bernadus_edwin » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:22 AM UTC

natfriedman wrote: post #69

ParanoidShroom wrote: post #31

I've been using Xamarin forms a lot now. They are miles from being as good as native development. Soooo many bugs in xamarin itself. When using Xamarin forms, you will not provide as good of product as you would native. There are also very little controls. Xaml works, but is really slow. And the layout is SOOO inefficient ! But the problem is even greater, you can't merge Android and iOS layout passes. On one platfor…

Hey, I'm the CEO of Xamarin. I'm really sorry that you had a bad experience with Xamarin.Forms. Did you try doing native development with Xamarin? I do want to be clear that Xamarin.Forms is not Xamarin. It's a library that we built to help people quickly write very simple, data-entry style apps. That's why it's called "Forms." It's not intended to be highly performant or to replicate all the per-platform APIs in Xam…

I using xamarin in last 16 months

From my experience, xamarin take wrong UI improvement strategy

Dont get me wrong, this is a good product, i love it, but just going to wrong direction

This is the big 2 mistakes:

1. You change the API class and method name to .net version

For first time user, this is good approach, but i must rename every sample snippet code from stackoverflow

You should save the resource for renaming API to something else more valueble ( hint : fixbug )

Are you rename the API because of patent and legal issue?

2. Xamarin form

This is the worst strategy.

Maybe this is good for B2B

And maybe B2B is good money

But for me, indie programmer, B2C product, i dont need xamarin form

I need best approach to use UI library

Stop xamarin form, there is other way to get 90 percent shared library

Support more on MVVM cross

Duplicate total of the xamarin component store

Improvement object sharpie to support UIKit.h

Object sharpie not working if using UI library

Android binding still design for eclipse project, not android studio

I'm wasting 1 week to bind ListViewAnimation android, and still not working

My point is, it really hard to bind UI library on xamarin

Conclusion,

Please please turn around and go back to your real core value.

We like native, improve native, do not recreate the UI component

You know what happend when you try recreate UI?

Go check java se and Qt

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#89

Post by insaneirish » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

> but 1000$ developer/year is not exactly cheap.

That is incredibly cheap. It's the sort of cheap that's so cheap you wonder what the catch is.

Assuming a perfectly spherical developer, you're at $100,000/year. You're using Xamarin because it makes that developer more efficient because (1) you've determined C# is an easier language to maintain and/or (2) cross compatibility is worth something. If this developer is just 1% more efficient, you've paid for your Xamarin license. If he's not 1% more efficient, why are you even using Xamarin in the first place?

Re: Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

#90

Post by tracker1 » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 4:29 AM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #58

natfriedman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

+1 on this... within a year, my main desktop OS will likely be Linux.. right now, I keep an Ubuntu VM in the background and edit in windows (Sublime) via Samba shares in the VM.. running via SSH terminal windows.. mainly because a significant amount of my time was windows dev.. this is shifting as I'm using node/io.js much more. This also means, however that I'm more likely to reach for something like Cordova for apps (you can go a long way with web based apps for many use cases) or React Native.