iPhone is for games, Android is for apps.

[Andre Garzia]

Mark,

DISCLAIMER: This is my personal opinion.

I have an iPhone, an iPad and an Android phone. I think that the hardest
thing for Android is dealing with the multitude of different screen
resolutions. While it is doable to create dynamic interfaces that resize as
needed, the fact is that there are android devices out there with
completely different proportions, ie: motorola has a SQUARE PHONE, ick!

With iOS, you only need to deal with 3 resolutions (for now), you need to
script for iPhone, iPhone with retina display and the iPad and you reach
the whole market, this is a lot easier.

Speaking about games and android, how do you go building your game
interface when you have gazillions of resolutions? Do you resize your
assets on first launch? Do you bundle multiple copies of each asset in the
most common resolutions? You try to resize at runtime (slow)? To have a
good reach on the android market, your software needs to be able to run on
different devices. A software that just run on my Nexus S will not achieve
great numbers on the market because it will alienate a multitude of devices.

That is why I think that the most useful thing that RunRev could add to
LiveCode would be a way for us to have some resolution independence. Like a
TV safe area concept from video editing. I remember that when I was at the
film school we had TVs and Monitors that had nested squares made with
marker pen. I asked a teacher why the monitors were marked like that and he
explained to me that stuff inside the innermost the marked area was sure to
appear in all TVs but stuff on the outer areas could not be guaranteed to
show because TVs has different frames that would hide part of the screen.

If we had something like that in LiveCode for mobile where we could place
stuff on an area and LiveCode would calculate any resizing needed to
display that area in full screen, it would make game writing much easier.
When dealing with devices that can go from 320x240 to 1024x768, we need
better tools or we risk having geometry routines that are larger than our
main app logic.

end of apology for resolution independence.

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:

> via Good Morning Silicon Valley... Two new reports out this week.
>
> "The first, a report by Xyologic, finds that “iPhone is for games, Android
> is
> for apps.” It found that of the top 150 downloads in November from the
> Apple App
> Store, 100 were games, and game downloads outnumbered app downloads by
> nearly a
> 3-1 margin (71.5 million to 25.6 million)."
>
> <
> http://www.xyologic.com/blog/the-top-25-iphone-and-android-app-publishers-in-2011-iphone-is-for-games-android-is-for-apps/
> >
>
> "Apple users certainly spend more money on apps. That was the finding in a
> second study, by analysis firm Distimo, that compared the top 200 apps in
> both
> the Apple and Android markets."
>
> <http://www.distimo.com/blog>
>
> --
>  Mark Wieder
>
>
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