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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting this, but the link is rather anemic for this audience; any possibility of a writeup (even a quick and short one) of how you did it? I've been looking at cross-platform solutions for apps, and the best I've come up with so far is Kivy (http://kivy.org) and haXe (http://haxe.org), which both still require a machine running OSX to package for iOS.

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Thanks, that's a good point. I am definitely planning on writing up everything I learned in the process. It just launched a few days ago so I'm still focused on handling that at the moment.

If you like I can e-mail you in the future when the article is out. There's contact info on my website: http://asivitz.com/cloudbreaker/

Eh, no pressure; I'll keep an eye on your website and HN, but I'd be curious if anyone here has found ways to do cross-platform (Android, iOS, Linux, OSX, Win, etc) apps from the environment of their choosing. I'm not looking to monetize, so arguments of "investing" into platforms I don't already have are moot; this is mostly a hobby/side "what could I do if . . . " sort of thing right now, and just having scheme as another option is awesome :)

https://wukix.com/mocl

I've recently spend quite some time trying to figure out what's the best way to use a Lisp in order to write multi platform games. I'm still in the researching phase, but if you need to support more than iOS & Android, then ClojureScript on top of a Javascript Game Engine (possibly with native extensions) is the best bet.

I could be mistaken (as I haven't actually researched this), but I don't think there is any way around needing OSX to package for iOS. Even tools like cordova/phonegap hook into a base Xcode project when it comes to compiling and packaging.

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus. I don't want to exclude anyone, but since I'm a Linux guy, I don't run any OSX, and quite frankly it seems like an unnecessarily high barrier to entry to require a single platform to develop for a device. Android, for instance, has SDKs for the three major desktop platforms, plus I can sideload without rooting or having to pay a yearly fee.

If youre a Linux guy just develop for Android. They have a thriving game market and you dont have to compromise openness.

If you're making games for the fun of it, your advice is spot on. But it's a terrible way to make a business decision if revenue matters. It's really more of a question of whether he has good reason to believe that 70% of the revenue is enough to cover an investment in a Mac + Developer Program. I don't much like Windows, but the investment in a license for Windows and Visual Studio has been returned many times over. Nevertheless, Android is a great place to start—on any platform.

Just to clarify some things:

1) What I want to do is create apps that scratch itches I've had for years, and they're all outside of work, and even if there was something available off the shelf, I'd kind of like to be able to hack on it (have source), just for practicality and fun's sake.

2) I don't want these apps to be restricted to any one platform.

3) I never plan to monetize these apps.

You're right - if I was going in this to make money, it's a simple decision. Pitted against my time and potential revenue, a Mac + Developer Program is dirt cheap.

OTOH, I develop in Emacs and Linux for a reason, even when I'm developing software for Windows. Since investing in a Mac + Developer Program would be a net loss by definition, I'm looking for any way to still be able to make these apps available for iOS. Looks like Apple doesn't want that kind of hobbyist input to their ecosystem (and yes, while I'm a professional in that I get paid for same at the day job, I consider these apps as hobby projects).

Sounds like a web app would satisfy your requirements.

The nice thing about both Kivy and haXe is that web apps are a strong possibility, and one I was thinking of doing anyway. Of course, with enough dev time, I could take any language/framework and make a web app from it. I wouldn't be surprised if there is already a library (or it's trivially easy) to generate JS or HTML5 from Scheme or some other Lisp :)

I think you could use the Phonegap Build service to avoid running OSX.

for HTML5, check out Cordova, even Adobe offers a free iOS / Android / Win8 compiler

On iOS Cordova works great, not so great on Android (I'm talking about game programming obviously) especially on Android 4.4.

Works great? Show me some apps please! They all are garbage compared to native imho. Not even really usable, again, in my opinion. I wouldn't recommend Cordova for anything at this point, not because of Cordova per se but rather because of the state of HTML5 on these devices. And I have built a lot of Cordova apps because clients demanded it; now we downright refuse as it's bad for your portfolio to do so. Even if it looks nice it will take weeks (months) to get it working really smooth (stuff you get for free native) and then it breaks suddenly because of some update (especially on Android, but also on iOS, for instance after the 7 update) and you are right back in hell. For every app I have seen which was 'ok' on Cordova you could build it great 3 times native for ANdroid,iOS and WP8 in less time.

I've built an app that worked well with Cordova: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.audreyt.di... ( Source: https://github.com/g0v/moedict-app/ ; Context: http://g0v.asia/tw/#Q1.2 ).

A dictionary — being text-based, with very few animations, and no background soundtracks — avoided most of mobile-platform-specific issues.

I've only said Cordova works great on iOS.

It doesn't work so great on Android, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that every Cordova app is garbage :). For some apps it works reasonably well, for others simply doesn't work.

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