New iOS WP-34s & WP-31s emulators

[pascal_meheut]

(01-16-2016 03:22 AM)BarryMead Wrote:  Has anyone experimented with the "Codename One" IDE. They claim that you can write your application once and have it run on iPhone, Android, and Windows mobile devices, all with a single common codebase.

I knew that someone would eventually consolidate these app development tools so that developers wouldn't have to do their work two or three times to support the various mobile devices in the market.

Plenty of tools claim they do so and some of them even succeed. For instance, Qt, the library used to develop the Windows/OSX/Linux emulator could also be used for an iOS & Android emulator with some adaptations.

As usual with such tools, the issues are elsewhere:

- how close to a native application can we be?
- how long will they be available?
- how fast do they support new devices, new OS versions?
- do they really support all the native functionalities?
- how hard is it overcome bugs or limitations?

And so on. Which is why they may be a good solution but also a trap.
When it comes to building a WP-34s emulator for Android, the main issue is not the code but the need to support many screen resolutions & hardware/software versions.
The iOS emulator uses 5 or so bitmaps for the various iPad/iPhone resolutions and each of them is tailor made to be as readable as possible: there is no formula to choose the font & margin size for instance.
Designing an android-compatible mechanism and adapting to the platform rules, peculiarities & store is more work than writing the emulation code in native Java. So the gain of a multi-platform IDE is not as big as one could think in this case.