Is Gideros ready for making applications instead of games?

plicatibu

I didn't know Gideros had UI components that allowed us to make apps instead of games.

After seen report complete application from @SinisterSoft I looked for UI components in documentation and I didn't found out some components, like an input text element.

Is there any external UI library to allow us to make a full application (not a game )?

I'm asking this because I don't know if @SinisterSoft made his own UI library neither how complete, mature this library is.

I was considering to use flutter (that is written in Dart programming language) to make apps for desktop and mobile phones, but if Gideros can do it as flutter does I'd be very happy to stick with it.

Thanks.

oleg

1, https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/TextInputDialog

2, https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/KeyCode

Also in the forum someone posted a text editor created in gideros

There is no difference between apps and games - games are very advanced apps

antix

You will need to use some 3rd party UI implementation or write your own I'm afraid.

Some of the really cool things about real apps is being able to schedule things like reminders, app startup at phone load, etc. These things just aren't available in Gideros.

Sure, you could add them inside Android Studio but that would be more hassle than it would be worth.

I'd say go with Flutter, but I looked at it and its not overly easy to get your teeth into IMHO.

I've been having some success using NodeJS, Electron, and JavaScript to enable application creation where the app is basically a web page that has access to the local file system.



The screenshot is my own UI editor written using JavaScript, Electron, and NodeJS. It can be compiled to Windows exe and also Mac (but I haven't tried that yet).

JavaScript is a pretty easy language to learn and HTML5 + CSS3 give you excellent UI creation options (although I hate both with a passion LOL).

One other thing is to think carefully about adopting google technologies because they are rather fond of just abandoning projects when they lose interest or they didn't get a big enough user-base... just be aware

plicatibu

@oleg Thanks for sharing. Developing regular applications implies in using many components that usually are not already available in 2D game frameworks so I consider developing them different from developing games.

@antix At first it didn't seemed so hard to use flutter (but I didn't digg to much into it to have a solid opinion about it). The part about Google abandoning their projects is a strong point to take in consideration. Maybe I go with Haxe and its stableUI library.
Thank you.

oleg

plicatibu said:

@oleg Thanks for sharing. Developing regular applications implies in using many components that usually are not already available in 2D game frameworks so I consider developing them different from developing games.

I do not agree, the games have all the possible components that are needed in the applications.

plicatibu

@oleg For sure one can make a desktop application using a 2D framework.

But how hard and time consuming would it be to create all components yourself?

I think it does not worth the effort. After all, I don't want to make components. I want to make an app.

Regards.

SinisterSoft

I have my own UI 'thing' that I'm making, it's not a class and heavily connected to my app. I plan to make it a separate entity eventually but no promises.

oleg

plicatibu said:

@oleg For sure one can make a desktop application using a 2D framework.

But how hard and time consuming would it be to create all components yourself?

I think it does not worth the effort. After all, I don't want to make components. I want to make2an app.

Regards.

As I said above, a component of text input has already been done and posted on the forum, search the snippets section.

Every programmer, when developing their own components, uses them repeatedly in different projects - and not difficult to do, this is great practice

MoKaLux

@plicatibu you can make apps using gideros, I did:
https://mokalux.itch.io/mkg-hijama
https://mokalux.itch.io/onetiletotileset
+ SinisterSoft ...
+ https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/AlertDialog
+ https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/Media
+ ...

It may depend of what you need. Flutter does not export to desktop yet but when it does it should be very nice too.

PaulH

I originally developed the app My Fishing Advisor in Eclipse for Android and Xcode for iOS, then later ported it to Gideros. I did end up writing a fair number of things, like a scroll view, but it worked well enough. At some point I want to completely overhaul the UI, and just use some things I've learned since then to clean things up. The ability to develop in one environment and export to several others was a big plus. The need to develop a custom plugin for a feature I needed (mapping) was a big minus. I'm still glad I ported it to Gideros.

Paul

plicatibu

@PaulH I'm glad you are glad

Many years ago I had to make scrolling lists, text input boxes, check boxes and so on for a J2ME product in the enterprise I worked for.

At the time it was a good experience but now
(15 years later) I don't want to do it again. I just want to use components. I'm getting older and lazy.

Regards.

MoKaLux

@plicatibu have you checked this section in the wiki Creating UI in Gideros? Right now I am using listview class which is quite nice and you can also tweak it to your needs (that's how I learn how gideros and lua work).

Apollo14

@plicatibu you should check 'Layout' GUI framework. It is pretty good.
http://forum.giderosmobile.com/discussion/6651/layout-gideros-gui-framework/p1

>Is it a good idea to create non-gaming apps using Gideros?
I guess it depends on your apps.
If you need some specific native android stuff that isn't implemented in Gideros, you should definitely use Android Studio (or Flutter, or React Native, or whatever, if they have this stuff)

hgy29

I guess it depends on which app you want to make in the end. My company uses Gideros to make apps, not games, and is happy with it: we previously had one native app for Android (java/xml) and another for iOS (ObjC) and it was too much trouble to maintain both codes in sync. Since we switched to Gideros, we have a single code for both platforms, and we were able to deliver to WindowsPhone and HTML too with minimal overhead. WP is dead now though, but we don't regret our move.

However yes, UI sucks takes a lot of efforts currently in Gideros, and I wish we could have some UI builder tool (like JFormDesigner I still use for Desktop Java). I have been working on a Widget kit for Gideros for some time now. It works, but I am not ready yet to share it, because I still refactor the code a lot.

I'd like to make a demo app for it, like a widget showcase, before releasing it.

plicatibu

Thank you guys for sharing your point of views, docs and experiences.

It's interesting how many new things I'm learning about Gideros.

keszegh

it depends on the application, i make my animating app in Gideros and i'm happy with it's performance etc., evidently i spend more time on the gui than optimal, but switching to another framework would be even more time at this point. also being cross-platform is an important feature.
i do need from time to time platform-specific (desktop) extra features but so far most of the time i could arrange it with @hgy29 to implement them for a fair donation.

hgy29

Here is a first attempt: https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/Hgy29_WidgetKit_WIP
Again I had to change a few things with the code to make it work, that's for this kind of reason that I am not ready to release it. Plus it appears to be rather slow on Html, not sure why yet.

plicatibu

@hgy29 Very nice!

rrraptor

hgy29 said:

Here is a first attempt: https://wiki.giderosmobile.com/index.php/Hgy29_WidgetKit_WIP
Again I had to change a few things with the code to make it work, that's for this kind of reason that I am not ready to release it. Plus it appears to be rather slow on Html, not sure why yet.

SHIFT+7 (& symbol) moves cursor to the begining of textbox (seems like a "Home" button ), "Enter" key prints space symbol instead of newline.

I like the code, its a lot more cleaner than mine ))

P.S. layout still doesnt work with sprites?)

P.P.S. I used FireFox, cuz chrome gives me error ("Your browser's WebGL doesn't support this app").