Open-source App IDE. Make Apps. Fast. | Hacker News Reader

Open-source App IDE. Make Apps. Fast.

kickstarter.com

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Existing completely free cross-platform apps with free IDE support:

Haxejs http://haxe.org/

Titanium Mobile http://appcelerator.com

Cordova/PhoneGap http://phonegap.com

Wakanda http://www.wakanda.org

These all have widget systems and GUI tools to create apps fast. Initially, making a cross-platform app seems easy and simple. It turns out debugging is really, really hard. There are many layers and a ton of version/device fragmentation. Betting my dev money on it for professional apps doesn't seem like a great idea. I think the killer feature should boil down to this:

    Magikai is great for kids who are just starting out in programming

Right now everything seems to be business focused, i.e. these 'no need to learn code' systems:

App Breeder http://www.appbreeder.com/

AppBotic http://www.appbotic.com/

App Inventor http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu

App Press http://www.app-press.com/

Chatty Apps http://www.chattysolutions.com/chattyapps.html

Shout 'Em http://www.shoutem.com/

Snappii https://www.snappii.com/

EDIT: And more -- http://dailytekk.com/2012/04/02/100-tools-to-develop-a-kille...

Generally a decent programmer will hit the limits of the 'easy' framework just slow enough to have wasted a ton of time. Then you have to drop into native code to fix the bugs that are not the priority of that specific framework.

Appcelerator has gained so much traction because they have a ton of developers concentrated on bugfixes and full native API support.

But, to get children started on programming is always a great idea, and as all of us young devs grow we will want to share the dev experience with our kids. If they can make that possible I think they'll have a home run on their hands.

> But, to get children started on programming is always a great idea, and as all of us young devs grow we will want to share the dev experience with our kids. If they can make that possible I think they'll have a home run on their hands.

This is worth repeating. Kids are, in general, fabulously creative and completely open minded with new technology. I can see all sorts of fun, frivolous, nefarious and downright evil uses for a simple app maker that works on any kid's phone. Little Johnny makes a simple set of static pages that stores crib notes for his classes. Evil Britney, who has a few more coding chops, comes up with an app that screen-scrapes the yearbook site and lets her friends rate all the boys in her year (she got the idea from The Social Network.)

If these guys can get their teeth into that market either officially (through schools) or via the terrifyingly powerful playground word-of-mouth network, this could become quite big. It's a hell of a long shot though.

That's why even though I am skeptical, I gave them an upvote. Kids also have a ton of time and are very tolerant of things not working right on the first try. If I could amuse myself with Logo and BASIC (and later on, writing class notes and formula-solvers in graphing calculators), then I'm sure modern-day kids could take a system like Magikai to places I can't imagine.

None of the other frameworks I am aware of even consider kids as a target market.

thanks for great response! I would love to talk to you further. If you like to contact me via the email in my info

Hi Eddie, no contact info shows for me in your HN profile. But, feel free to contact me through any channel, I am doublerebel everywhere.

thanks for great response! I would love to talk to you further. If you like to contact me via the email in my info

Hi, founder here. Thanks for a great list of competitors! We have a product we feel have both business application and education tool potential. Perhaps we could focus on teaching both kids and business people who have no knowledge of programming.

The world's already got a few of these to my knowledge, Brightcove launched one last week with native plugins..I personally would love to see a fully native version of this. People want real UIKit/Android components, not an approximation of same.

Before putting out a crossplatform IDE/Framework like this one should examine the existing ones like Adobe's PhoneGap or Trigger.io etc.. They have been working on this for some time and they have started out supporting native UI elements.

Magikai may only be useful for people who really have a basic understanding of html and want to create a simple app that they have been thinking of.

But not my cup of tea.

Hi, founder here. In fact, we build on top of Phonegap, and enhance it with plugins that don't exist for Phonegap yet, i.e push notification, SMS, facebook connect, and so on. We'll make the change in the kickstarter page.

Sounds too good to be true. And you know what they about that

Hi, founder here. We're really trying to promote HTML5 development, and we believe can pull it off with our team.

The screen shots seem to show iOS apps on both sides. If the Android apps don't look like Android apps then it isn't a tool I want to use.

Hi, founder here. Apologies, that was a mistake. We'll fix it soon.

How is $18,000 nearly enough for this?

I'll back it if it comes with that awesome bugs bunny sound track.

In 29 days they've managed to get two people to pledge $1 apiece.

They have 29 days _left_

If you actually looked, you'd see that there's 29 days to go, and it started today.

29 days to go.

"in browser"

why!?

Because web programmers are terrified of native development.

It infuriates me to no end.

Yeah, but it keeps rates up on the native side. I kinda like them being scared; when they get too close I can wave pointers around like a wand and they scurry away.

For my part, I'm a bit scared of web development: without a compiler, I'd have to keep working all the time. I'd miss fencing on chairs.

You can add a few layers here and there, like a build process, and continuous integration or static analysis or release engineering.

It doesn't come near compiler times, but it's close enough.

Nnnnnnoooooppppppeeeeee

This is ridiculous.

Have to agree with that. Especially the video: He doesn't even seem to try to talk freely at the beginning, and later the music which makes it harder to understand anything. Also, I don't see why I would want to use something like that. I can just use MacVim for editing and Phonegap for native API access. Phonegap also has tutorials for how to package the app (with a web view).

Hi, founder here. Thanks for the suggestion! We'll fix it for the next video.

Hi, founder here. Would you mind letting us know what's bad about the kickstarter? we're here to learn :)

Personally, I want to be able to easily make cross platform apps that use Native components, not HTML5 apps.

Qt? wxWidgets? Gtk? XUL?

I think that our definitions of easy differ.

I don't consider any of those kits very easy to deal with, despite the fact that I am fully capable of building apps with them.

They're certainly nowhere near the realm of kits like RealStudio/RealBasic, FileMaker, Access, VB4/5/6 or even WinForms with Visual Studio (some of which I know are not cross-platform...but they are easy).

perhaps the reason those are easy is _because_ they weren't cross platform?

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