Best App making kit/engine?

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hallsofvallhalla
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Best App making kit/engine?

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Need to build an app. It is not a game. Anyone got any suggestions on some kits out there? best software to use? I am looking at the app game kit as it is easy to use and is tailored for both apps and games.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by Jackolantern »

Is this a mobile app? What are the requirements?
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Hehe yeah forgot to mention a mobile app. Probably just for android. Not high requirements. It is just going to accept messages from a server and display them.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by Jackolantern »

Ionic could do that pretty easily. Really, you wouldn't even need Ionic. You could use Cordova and connect to your server with AJAX calls or WebSockets. Ionic would give a nice look and feel that is similar to mobile apps and makes it look native, though. Of course Ionic uses Angular. If you didn't want to use Angular you could check out Onsen.js, which can provide a native mobile app look and feel without having to use a framework (although they do have libraries for Angular, React and Vue).

Since you already have such a foundation of knowledge in Web development, I would leverage that to make the app rather than trying to start over from scratch with some native framework.
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Thanks! I bought app game kit as well as i have an idea for a game i want to try
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Jackolantern
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by Jackolantern »

Nice! I have eyed that a few times but was always a bit worried about the code structure. It didn't look OOP from the examples they showed and it gave me flashbacks to the old DarkBasic days, where your game was expected to be one huge, monolithic file doing everything procedurally.

I really like the Phaser game engine and have wondered a few times how well its performance may be with a game-based mobile wrapper such as Cocoon. I know a few people have had good luck with it. Of course that is really just for 2D.
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

Thanks for all the info. For my apps I am using Onsen with Visual Studio and Cordova. For games i bought App game kit. Will let you know how they all work out. i am going ot try to use node on the backend to connect the phone to the server. Basically I need to send data to the phone when a new account is created. may need to look into push notifications too.
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Jackolantern
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

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Yeah, I think you will need push notifications for that. Normally it wouldn't be a problem if your app was running on the user's phone all the time but that isn't really possible most of the time. So you need a way to send out a notification, and push notifications fit the bill.
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hallsofvallhalla
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by hallsofvallhalla »

1 hour of developing the app and 3 hours of trying to get windows to recognize my phone so i could push the app to it for testing, :roll:
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Jackolantern
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Re: Best App making kit/engine?

Post by Jackolantern »

hallsofvallhalla wrote:1 hour of developing the app and 3 hours of trying to get windows to recognize my phone so i could push the app to it for testing, :roll:
Welcome to mobile app development!

But seriously, yeah, that kind of crap really makes you pine for the "it just works" simplicity of the Web.
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