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The Nerdiacs report great success using Marmalade to port games to Android and iPhone. They say:
“When we started development on our first title, the first thing as usual was to find our needs and select an engine in accordance to them. After considerable debate, we knew what we really needed was a cross-platform engine for mobile phones which should have solid 3D apis and support as many platforms as possible. This hunt coupled with our naivety as it was our first title, led to us the EdgeLib Engine. Our experiences with it was scarring to say the least, but definitely a huge learning experience which we will leave at that for a post in the future. This made us hunt for a new stronger solution, that we can call our base, our motherland, and that is exactly what we found with Airplay SDK now called Marmalade.”
Marmalade’s strength is in taking iOS games to Android. They allow the use of full-featured C++ and support both Microsoft Visual C++ and Mac XCode.
Marmalade is fully owned by Ideaworks3D Limited. Learn more on their website.
FiveSpark is a beta-stage web-based DIY mobile app builder based in Boston. It’s a closed beta, so we haven’t seen any details, but they are focused on small and medium sized businesses.
Learn more on their website.
Red Foundry announced a drop in pricing for their app development software offering. The lowest monthly package is now $39/month.
Subscribers to Red Foundry get a web-based (DIY) application building tool with the option to self-publish or have Red Foundry publish the app.
Learn more at Red Foundry.
The M-Project just launched a new HTML5 JavaScript platform for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. It’s similar to JQuery.
M-Project is produced by German-based MyWaySolutions which makes transcoding software. Check out their GitHub repository to see more.
Want to know what’s required to build an iPhone native app? A quick and easy way to learn is to open up an existing iPhone app.
It’s actually quite easy, you don’t need any fancy developer tools or technical skills. You just follow these instructions from AppStorm.
This technique is helpful for figuring out what’s inside an app that was created through native app-building software like Appmakr or Titanium.
For example, here’s a peak inside the file directory of an Appmakr app I made:
Story via ReadWriteWeb.
Independent game developer SemisecretSoftware has just released the iOS framework that they used internally for building their hit games. It’s released under the MIT license, so it’s wide open for any developer to use.
Read the announcement here.
Here is the source code and the website for Flixel, the Flash game framework that they ported to iOS to build Canabalt.
Currently iPhone only, AppMakr provides a do-it-yourself interface for building mobile apps. The biggest advantage is it’s free to use. Yes, you can build a complete functional native app for free. Their toolset makes it easy to incorporate an RSS feed of content (either your own or someone else’s), upload images, and change splash screen and headers. If you want custom content within your app that is not RSS, you will have to figure out how to build mobile web pages which can be uploaded to Appmakr and displayed locally within the native app. Keep in mind, it requires technical skill and patience to test your app on devices and publish it to the app store.
If you’re in a rush, you can hire AppMakr to do the difficult parts for you for a price. They can even submit to the app store for you.
Learn more at their website.
MobiFlex is the latest of the do-it-yourself toolkits to come to market. Like AppMakr or MobileRoadie, they provide a website where you can drag-and-drop components to create a mobile app. However, MobiFlex is uniquely positioning itself as the solution for the enterprise. It’s currently the only DIY solution that has database support, for example. On the other hand, it’s more challenging to build a beautiful interface with MobiFlex than with other solutions.
If you visit the websites of the various cross-platform mobile frameworks, it’s not immediately clear what they do. In particular, it’s important to understand that PhoneGap and Titanium are platforms for building actual native code, while Sencha and JQuery are javascript libraries for building mobile web apps.
Rick Blalock has an eloquent explanation of the difference on BeautyInDesign:
A lot of people think that Titanium and PhoneGap are in competition with Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile. They aren’t the same thing. I’m sure I’m going to get some comments on this but think of a mobile web app as a website. Think of it as Basecamphq.com or Twitter.com. A mobile web app runs in your browser. Almost all of the app’s resources are remote, stored on some server somewhere. Sure there might be some local storage happening but at the end of the day it’s a website application.
A native app runs on your device. All of it’s resources are installed locally on your machine. A native app uses platform and language specific API’s native to that device. You can’t run NSString in a mobile web app. A native app has access to local resources while a mobile web app cannot.
EasleJS just announced a new Javascript library for building HTML5 games or apps. It’s built by a development firm gskinner but they are releasing under the MIT license for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial re-use.
It’s only v1, so hopefully we’ll see more good stuff from them. They claim support for iOS and Android, but most of the current samples don’t function particularly well on the mobile devices we tested.
Here’s a screenshot of their moving rats sprite sheet demo. Simple but nice on Chrome:
