Be Excellent To Each Other

Dull people perhaps went out with friends, or had sex with a pretty lady, but like all the cool kids I've spent today learning to program mobile apps.

FEAST YOUR EYES ON MY BRILLIANCE, ANDROID OWNERS!


Kindle Fire folk - here's a special one for you:

Apple folk - you would have something to try but I don't have a Mac so I'm not allowed to program iOS things

Anyway, quickly press the pop-up that appears and touch near the bottom of the screen to move left and right, and further up to fire your LAY ZOR. And don't let the baddies go past, or you die.

And when you die, you have to start the application again. I wrote that bit last, and realised that there was no realistic way of getting the game to reset

Sweet! If my Sexus un-dies, I'll check this out.

I don't understand why people always think that's remarkable. There's no version of Visual Studio for OS X or Linux either, to name just one shocking example of an OS vendor favouring its own platform. And given the shoddy state of iTunes for Windows, the mere idea of Xcode for Windows is quite, quite awful.

There's dot net compilers for other platforms, aren't there? Also, considering the fuck awful state of xcode on OSX I dread to think what it'd be like on windows. 8gb min requirement for a fucking IDE!

That aside, this was fun. I got 55 then one with a blue thingy appeared and I died. The game over text was fuxxored, btw.

GOD I hate xcode. And iOS code signing.

Sorry. I'll shut up now.

I saw - bizarrely, the simulator on the PC can't render text boxes (which I needed for centre alignment), so I couldn't tell.

I'd fix it, but it's not really worth the bother


It's not that remarkable, I just thought I'd explain why there's no iOS version to try. Not that I know how you'd sideload an app on iOS anyway.

I do think it's a debatable position, though - if you made a killer app (which, you know, I clearly have) and sold it on the App Store Apple would make money. If Google suddenly decided that you could only release Android stuff if it was coded on Chrome OS I think people would be rightly surprised.

There's Mono, a community-led open source reverse engineered project with partial .Net compatibility. That's a far cry from a Microsoft set of tools. Also, a compiler and a runtime are not an IDE.

Yes. This.

I've run Xcode with 4 GB, so that's not right. If you mean "runs like a dog with less than 8 GB when doing anything non-trivial" then the same is true of Eclipse.

It's hard work, as Craster has intimated.

Writing Good Windows Software is a fucking long way down the list of Apple's core competencies. I'm not surprised it has no appetite for porting it's most complex (and arguably flakiest) product to an alien OS.

Particularly given that Chrome OS is just a web browser.

But Apple making iTunes for Windows is precisely why they should do it... How is it that Windows is so ubiquitous they can't not release their godawful fucking media player for it but not sufficiently so that they have to release the dev environment?

And why would Microsoft port Visual Studio to such a small number of machines, especially when half the owners of those machines (and certainly the half who'd know Visual Studio from Python probably dual boot into (a nicked) copy of Windows anyway?

Scale's the important thing here. The fact that iTunes is even out on windows shows that Apple realise that the scale thing is huge.

Xcode is a billion times harder to write and maintain on a second OS platform than iTunes. They aren't equivalent products.

Anyone serious about writing an app for iOS isn't going to be put off by requiring a Mac. Anyone put off by that isn't very serious, so is no great loss

iTunes on Windows was a way to unlock hundreds of millions of possible new iPod customers. Xcode on Windows might enable a few thousand extra devs, at a stretch, and they'll be the casual, novice devs. There's no scale. No upside for the vast effort.

They're not an IDE, but you can do all the rest in notepad, so the compiler's all that really matters. Although for iOS it's just gcc isn't it? Though with added complex voodoo logic to make it impossible to use without doing it via Xcode.





It'll run with 4, but 8GB is the published minimum, and means you'll get "Hai, add RAMS please" if you ever want to raise a support case without it.

Sure. Or we could just go back to punch cards if we only care about compilers and developer efficiency means nothing. And we'll just debug via code walking, no need for the complete ARM emulator in the iOS Simulator.

No. It switched to LLVM some time ago.

That's not the problem I had, actually - I used a 3rd party SDK that lets you code for both platforms at once, and then compiles the files for you. Because I wasn't using a Mac, it couldn't compile the iOS version for me, so it's not a "software writing" issue - in my case, at least.

Out of interest, can you code for Windows Phone on a Mac?

Not saying an IDE isn't better, just saying that providing a compiler at least gives you options.

Which one?

Certainly one.of the guys here reckons the code you produce without an ide is worse and so doesn't always use one.
Trade off between usability and code.familiarity.

For much of the time.coding for mobile.phones, I didnt use an IDE as they tended to be.rather pap.

Corona SDK: http://coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/

It's pretty good, and obviously easy to learn, but there are already a few things about it I dislike (not least the price, although the trial lasts forever, so it's fine for fiddling with).

But people who "know" say you should learn Lua (the programming language Corona uses) with this one, then switch to the free but less user-friendly MOAI (which also uses Lua): http://getmoai.com/

I do quite like Lua. Which makes it fairly unique among Scripting languages.

As do I - I don't like the physics engine that Corona has, though.

I've been tasked with writing an app that's compatible with iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Corona won't cut it, by the looks.

D'oh.

It'll get you half way there.