Anyone had experience with time-saving toolkits for Mobile Development?

I've done both iOS programming for iPad/iPhone and Android programming. All in the native platforms - Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android.  Conversion between the two is much easier than porting to basic or an other non-C-derived language, but still takes no small amount of effort.

There are toolkits that claim to make the development and porting much easier.  Specifically, MonoTouch by Novel and a tool called Sencha-touch.

Does anyone have an experience with these?

My past experience with toolkits that claim to save time has been much to the opposite.  Generally there is less initial development time, but maintainence becomes clumsy and cumbersome.

Any thoughts?

Views: 198

Replies to This Discussion

But why not use phonegap?

Have you used phonegap?  And if you did. did it save man-hours in the long run?

Yes, I would also like to hear about other's experience with PhoneGap.

Kevin Neelands said:

Have you used phonegap?  And if you did. did it save man-hours in the long run?

Phone gap and titanium are good although you would have to follow their convention. I would say givin you are used to working in a c-based language you just use c then just implement the UI in objective-c or java. Or even better use a open gl es based UI library then it will run on both (basically what some frameworks do). I have been toying lately with the idea of using node native modules compiled for arm but I am still working on that.


P.S. you can compile objective c natively on android but not all the cocoa libraries (uikit) are open sourced yet.

Check out Corona. Although it is mostly used for game development, I've known many people using it for database applications lately. I've attended their last Meetup and it was an inspiring experience.

I personally was looking to overcome the fragmentation issues. After the meetup I realized there are no silver bullets. It's even a topic many people avoid talking about.

I hope this helps. Try Corona, it's free to try and very cheap to use commercially.

Corona looks interesting but -1 for needing to buy and -1 for not having a responsive website

RSS

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

pnpm 11 Release Candidate: ESM Distribution, Supply Chain Defaults and a New Store Format

pnpm 11 RC has been released, featuring significant changes in performance, security, and configuration. Key updates include an SQLite-backed store index, tighter security defaults, and a consolidated build script setting. It now requires Node.js v22 or later. Global installs are isolated by default, and new commands enhance usability. Migration guidance is available in the documentation.

By Daniel Curtis

Anthropic Introduces Managed Agents to Simplify AI Agent Deployment

Anthropic introduces Managed Agents on Claude, a managed execution layer for agent-based workflows. It separates agent logic from runtime concerns like orchestration, sandboxing, state management, and credentials. The system supports long-running multi-step workflows with external tools, error recovery, and session continuity via a meta-harness architecture.

By Leela Kumili

Slack Rebuilds Notification System, Reports 5X Increase in Settings Engagement

Slack has rebuilt its notification system with a unified architecture that separates activity from delivery, improving consistency across platforms. The redesign simplifies preferences, preserves legacy settings through transformation, and resulted in a 5x increase in user engagement with notification settings along with reduced support tickets.

By Leela Kumili

GitHub Acknowledges Recent Outages, Cites Scaling Challenges and Architectural Weaknesses

GitHub has publicly addressed a series of recent availability and performance issues that disrupted services across its platform, attributing the incidents to rapid growth, architectural coupling, and limitations in handling system load.

By Craig Risi

Presentation: Dynamic Moments: Weaving LLMs into Deep Personalization at DoorDash

Sudeep Das and Pradeep Muthukrishnan explain the shift from static merchandising to dynamic, moment-aware personalization at DoorDash. They share how LLMs generate natural-language "consumer profiles" and content blueprints, while traditional deep learning handles last-mile ranking. This hybrid approach allows the platform to adapt to short-lived user intent and massive catalog abundance.

By Sudeep Das, Pradeep Muthukrishnan

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service