How’s the quality on Xojo mobile? Is it ready for external facing B2B apps?
I’m facing a choice of taking my complicated existing Mac/PC app and reworking all the views or developing an iPhone/Mobile app is another cross platform environment. (You can see the app at www.officetime.net)
With workarounds, I’ve been happy with Xojo desktop but I worry about the relative newness of Xojo mobile. Plus, I’d have to build native Widgets and Apple Watch app to integrate with.
You’ll be better off using Xcode if that’s the case. They’re a whole other beast and IMHO mech with the main app easier if you’re using the same dev environment for everything.
If you didn’t need Widgets and Apple Watch app, I’m doing a talk at the MBS conference in Germany in a couple of weeks on how to create identical code to run on Desktop, Web and iOS ie a single code base for Xojo cross-platform apps.
If you’re doing iPad - then no. Tons of people use iPads with external keyboards - but there’s absolutely no way to tell if users have hit any modifier keys (Command/Option/Control), and it’s not possible to add keyboard shortcuts to iPad builds - something Apple and users expect with external keyboards.
If you’re doing custom undos, you’re SOL when it comes to users with external keyboards. Apple expects Undo/Redo to work with keyboard shortcuts if a someone is using an external keyboard. This is impossible in Xojo right now.
Do you need a separate project for iOS from desktop (and Android)?
Yes, one per environment, but they are skeletons only ie they have the fields, buttons, etc, but no code. All the code is in the external class that is shared across desktop, web and mobile.
That sounds doable but cumbersome. I’d imagine you end up with a lot of wrapper classes, parent/child classes and general if platform x, then methods. Plus a lot of edge case scenario handling.
When I read that sentence, I thought Mark was exaggerating, but in the end, he’s right. It’s true that on iPad, and especially in the professional world, the external keyboard is used more and more. Apple even promotes it. And the iPad is behaving more and more like a computer, albeit a different one.
Gone are the days of demonstrating the iPad on a sofa for reading or watching movies. In the meantime, phones have grown in size and taken this place. And on the other hand, iPads have become much more powerful and functional, and are increasingly sold as a kind of computer.
And the fun of the touch keyboard is over too, with all the typos it generates, the enormous space it takes up on the screen, etc.
@Christian_Schmitz , there may be room for a good keyboard management plugin here if you haven’t already.
Apple call them one too,
Im sick of people trying to run MacOs apps on them and blaming me when they dont work - even though I state in lots of places ‘iPads cannot run this software’
if apple are keen to call an iPad a computer, and keen to add keyboards, how hard would it be for them to offer MacOs on them these days?
How different are they really from a Macbook Air with one less USB-C port?
