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Question

Mobile development

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
July 29, 2011
3 replies
820 views

How much are developers missing when they develop with air compared to say developing natively with android SDK or iOS SDK???

Is it a better use of time learning native code rather than learning and figure out work arounds with flex/flash/air for mobile development?

Development

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S

SpaghettiCoderAuthor

Known Participant

There seems to be little love for Objective C...is the problem the language or is it because the IDE you have to use...

Is Developing for Android SDK much better?

Flash Builder Mobile seems to be missing

1. Drop Down List

2. Calendar

Are these considered not important? or is it due to time constraint Adobe hasn't been to have it available for the 4.5.1 release?

R

Rangora

Inspiring

The IDE is fine. There are a lot of resources out there for iOS developpers. The problem with Objective-C is the language. It's C with an annotation system for objects. The main problem is that it's really different from the languages most of the developpers use (C++, Java, AS3, C#, etc). Look at an introduction to Objective-C and you will understand what I means. For example, this is a basic method call in Objective-C :

BOOL result = [myData writeToFile:@"/tmp/log.txt" atomically:NO];

Android SDK is easier to learn because it's in Java... If you know any OO language, java should be easy to learn. The main problem of Android is the emulator... It is SO slow

DropdownList and Calendar doesnt have a mobile skin so they are not "mobile-safe". With a bit of practice, you can do your own widgets (I made a DropdownList). Of course, you can also find them on internet...

https://www.flextras.com/?event=ProductHome&productID=21

https://www.flextras.com/index.cfm?event=ProductHome&productID=15

I might publish my own dropdown soon if I find enough time to refactor it a bit

I think Adobe will implement them in spark mobile in the future... I'm pretty sure they know it's needed components since they even made a custom "dropdown" in the Sales dashboard example

A

Anonymous

There is a hand full of things that just cannot be done with AIR as opposed to doing it the way Apple wants you to do it but the benefits are huge too. First off you will understand flash if you already don't and that can be used for so much on its own, second biggest advantage as I see is that you can make one app and put it out on several major platforms with minimal or no changes. Plus Adobe seems to care for its community and support it.

R

Rangora

Inspiring

In fact, you should probably design you app before you start coding and check if everything you want to do is supported by AIR for iOS. In the majority of the cases, if you app doesn't need to access devices API or sensors, you should'nt see AIR limitations.

AIR allow you to make nice cross-platform apps without learning 2 or 3 languages (including objective-c :S). Your app will also work on Windows/Mac.

If your app design is fully supported by AIR, i would chose AIR... If it's not... then you will have to decide if you try to find workarounds or code in native languages.

Colin Holgate

Inspiring

At the very least, AIR developers miss out on months of painful learning of Objective-C.

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