Have freelance job on VR - Business app and need to make it in VR and noVR modes.
Can I develop it in Unity and what problems can I face? Or can I make noVR-part in Android studio and then combine it with Unity VR-part?
Searching on the internet and can't find a proper answer.
Unity 4.6+ has a new UI thats canvas based, its pretty ok but not as nice as a modern MVVM enabled UI frameworks. There are assets you can buy that enable MVVM in Unity UI. I would recommend this if your UI is complex
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=rating/query=mvvm
The big problem with using Unity for any kind of business app type thing is that when entering text into GUI.TextFields you can't edit the text directly in the textbox. For any kind of form that has a bunch of textboxes and things to interact with, you need to do it in UIKit.I myself wouldnt use unity for what you want to do, try to look into the google Android SDK.
Related
For more context, I'm developing a Augmented Image Android app. Because of a series of unfortunate events, I ended up trying to develop this having absolute 0 Android experience, but here I am. The thing is, I can't find good tutorials on this topic (ARCore in Android Studio), so I am taking Google example apps and trying to understand how they work.
It seems that it enters in detail about OpenGL, but I don't have the time to learn it properly. I found this thing called SceneViewer, which seemed just what I need. An easy way to charge and display a model/scene to my ARCore anchors. But, it seems discontinued. Or for what I have found, it isn't compatible any longer with Android Studio.
Is there anything out there that could serve this purpose? Or Scene Viewer can still do this job?
I'm new to Kotlin and Android studio, I previously completed a project of mine with KivyMD, I want to replicate the project with Kotlin using Android studio, the project has 56 screens, I've learnt that activities represents screen in Android Studio, which means I'll have to create 55 more activities in additional to MainActivity, thinking that might be a bit much I googled if they is a limit to number of activities I can create I found it's 10..
So how do I put the contents of other screens? or Could I just go ahead and create all 56 activities??
Thanks to you for your help in advance..
Jetpack is a bunch of libraries created to ease app development and help people follow best practices, and the official recommendation is a single-Activity app:
Navigation
While activities are the system provided entry points into your app's UI, their inflexibility when it comes to sharing data between each other and transitions has made them a less than ideal architecture for constructing your in-app navigation. Today we are introducing the Navigation component as a framework for structuring your in-app UI, with a focus on making a single-Activity app the preferred architecture.
By using the Navigation component, your Activity is basically a container for Fragments, which act as your "screens". Navigation handles a lot of the boilerplate for swapping them in and out and maintaining history, and you focus more on connecting them together in a navigation graph.
It's a lot to learn at first, but it's definitely worth it, and if you're going to be messing with 56 destinations then you'll probably end up saving a lot of time letting it handle the bulk of the work! Here's a codelab tutorial you can do to get up to speed with it, and here's the documentation which starts with the basics and gets to some of the more complex uses
I am new to Xamarin and not sure if chose Xamarin.Forms to create a application for ios and android platform has a problem or not.
The application has some features below:
The application will be able to running some code in background without launching application by user.
The application can be launched by a href link or a notification.
The application is able to launch a builtin Camera application, and receive picture data from Camera application.
Thanks,
Bo
The features you are mentioning can be done with both. Actually, anything you can do on Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android can be done with Forms. Because Forms is only an abstraction layer for the UI which is installed by a NuGet package.
Now, having that said when to use Forms or when to use iOS/Android? It is mostly about UI. Are you going to do some advanced or platform specific stuff is is easier to implement that with the platform specific project.
If you UI will be the same in both platforms and mostly consists of some lists and input fields, then that is a very good candidate for a Forms project.
Notice how I said it is easier to do in the platform specific projects. Again here, you can do anything in Forms as well by the means of Custom Renderers, it is just a bit harder to do.
Ideally try it out yourself and see what suits you best.
In regard with your need to execute code in the background. This will be tricky and is very dependent on the platform that you're on. You will definitely have to write platform specific code for that for which you can use the DependencyService to abstract it to your shared code.
However like AlancLui mentioned executing code in the background isn't something that is easy to do on mobile. On iOS it is restricted to accessing location data or playing music, but still your app needs to be running (in the background). Android has something called Services for this, which makes it a bit easier.
I currently have a very simple memory game for Windows Phone that I would like to port over to iOS, Android and possibly Win8 using Xamarin tools.
I would like to centralize my business logic in one assembly and simply create the UI for each platform.
For the most part, the code is simple C#, but I do make use of Bitmaps to show the cards in the game. However, from what I've read, there is no standard support across the different platforms for using Bitmaps.
What would be a recommended approach to this problem?
I'm thinking I have to use something like MonoGame, but feel that is overkill for what I want to do.
You say your code is in C#. As far as I know Xamarin is the only way to get C# code to run on Android and iOS. Xamarin has a free starter edition that you might be able to use but your app will be size limited. Once you hit the size limit you'll need to pay for a license.
After you've decided to pay for a license there are no other costs involved if you want to use MonoGame for the port. If your game is already using XNA or you have some XNA experience I recommend using MonoGame. MonoGame is a port of XNA and is designed for making games, so many game related tasks are easier.
The alternative is to build your game as an app using the standard app building API. This is possible but I can't see any advantages doing it this way unless you are trying to save money by using Xamarin's free edition. If you plan to make more games in the future, you'd be better off biting the bullet and learning MonoGame.
Using bitmaps with MonoGame shouldn't be a problem. Although, you may need to convert them to PNG's first.
Centralizing the business logic in one assembly is sort of possible using Portable Class Libraries but due to the limitations of PCL's it's often easier to use file sharing. Basically you have a soft link to the files in each project. Updating the files updates them in all projects at the same time, but adding new files requires you to add them to each project individually. It's a little bit of a maintenance pain, but not much.
For sure, as a starting point you should separate UI and logic.
To reach this I highly recommend you to make console version of game. Using console it is possible only send commands with parameters to application. No mouse or real-time keyboards usages. All UI-related tasks will be left. Only business logic and commands to use will remain.
Then, you should try MonoGame. It's reliable enough for 2D games. Even more, If IL-code is not too much, it's free for iOS and Android!
Other way is... Unity 3D. Using that engine is depends of code you wrote. In some cases it's possible to use that game engine with shared business logic. Thanks to new Unity 3D policy, indie game developers could make and deploy their games for free.
In short, plan is:
Implement core functionality (with console I/O);
Then, choose engine and implement UI for target platforms.
I have an application that will need to better support tablets in the future. I have seen some apps already created with UP1 and ExtLib Mobile Controls but I was wondering if anyone knows of specific functionality that simply is too challenging to even consider bringing to a mobile device?
For example, are there partial refresh issues on specific devices? Can managed beans still be used behind the scenes? Is dynamic content totally viable on mobile?
I'd be interested in hearing what big challenges/functions people had to give up when they mobilized their existing XPage apps.
There isn't really anything in XPages that would prevent building mobile web apps as with other web app dev models. In other words: Everything you can do with web apps on mobile you should be able to do with XPages.
XPages 8.5.3 UP1 comes with Dojo Mobile 1.6.1. However that does not prevent developers from using other frameworks like JQuery or anything else.
There are some advantages in general for native apps and hybrid apps. But personally I think most of the typically rather simple business apps can be built with mobile web apps. If you need local data/offline that might be different though.
You can use Xpages to do anything that is possible with mobile web developement. Dynamic content may not be the way to go for everything, but it will run just fine. In ITANA available for free on openntf.org, i created a simple replication engine to replicate notes tasks from the local device using sqlite to the domino server. This makes it run very fast and allows the app to run offline as well.
So i believe anything you want to try will work, you can make the Xpage output anything you want, from html, to xml, or json, to accomplish your tasks.
I know that XPages was totally incompatible with older Blackberry's. I assume that's not the case these days but back at OS 5.0 I think even buttons wouldn't work. So if you're doing anything with BB make sure it's modern and tested.
We're not really getting tablet support in ext. library until the next dojo rev I think. But there is a preview of tablet support somewhere that you can get. I've not looked yet but it was mentioned at Lotusphere. so if you want to hit tablets you might want to roll your own right now until that comes available.
Tablets are a little more challenging as the mobile controls are designed for the mobile phone size devices. That said with a little trial and error you can get a nice navigator split screen and still use the one page app mobile controls to streamline it, with records opening in their own page just like the phone version. Type ahead as I'm discovering should be handled differently if you are using the iPhone themes from oneui2.1
The oneui2.1 gives your navs and views nice styling. The forms may need a bit of custom styling.
Split your design into custom controls then you can use a server ate xpage for mobile devices and straight web. Or if you forgo the use of mobile single page controls you can always just have a seperate style sheet to accommodate the iPad. Really depends on the functionality needed. Good luck
My suggestion for anyone wanting to do tablet specific development using XPages is to move to Notes 9.0 and dojo 1.8 asap. Dojo 1.8 has an experimental control called ScreenSizeAware. This is miles ahead of anything else either the Extension Library Mobile controls or Dojo provides for Tablet development.