Mobile Apps: Battery Life Native vs LiveCode

Thomas McGrath III mcgrath3 at mac.com
Mon Apr 30 09:14:20 EDT 2012


Rod,

As far as I can tell LC is using the same lower level calls to location tracking and other iOS services as is available via Xcode which would lead me to believe that there should not be any differences to battery life while using these calls. I am not sure how the calls to location services are handled on Android devices, so i can't tell if LC is doing something different there.

A lot of optimization goes on with native Apple apps to keep things like location tracking etc. from being too slow and/or draining the battery. After this process they release the api for public use with any optimized code inherent in the libraries. (There are some api's that Apple has ultra-optimized but are not available to the developer at this time, but location tracking is not one of them.)

That said, not all of LC's features (image object, field object) have been fully optimized for iOS usage and as such 'could' result in more of a drain than a C++ counterpart (it would have to be a very slight difference however) and any specific iOS functions can be handled using an external which should then give the same results as using those libraries in Xcode.

Some things will be slower using the LC object versus a native iOS object but this should not drastically affect anything other than speed.


-- Tom McGrath III
http://lazyriver.on-rev.com
3mcgrath at comcast.net

On Apr 30, 2012, at 8:49 AM, Roderick McCALL wrote:

> Dear John and Colin,
> 
> Thanks for your replies… Actually I am not sure if it is worse than anything else but I'll put it this way it is currently the subject of much debate here in the office.  I am genuinely interested in any stats people may have collected as we would rather go cross-platform if it is practical for our work.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> rod
> 
> 
> Dr Rod McCall
> Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT)
> The University of Luxembourg
> www.securityandtrust.lu<http://www.securityandtrust.lu>
> Twitter: rodlux blog: www.rodmc.com<http://www.rodmc.com>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Apr 30, 2012, at 2:11 PM, John Dixon wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> What would make you think that mobile apps built with liveCode are any better or any worse than mobile apps built with other software ?
> 
> We are currently looking into using LiveCode for a variety of location-aware programs that we want to test on Android and IOS. One key issue is battery life with many viewing any cross-platform tools as having a negative impact. Therefore does anyone have a view or objective measures for this across a range of mobile tasks or have experience of these issues from their existing projects?
> 
> We will most likely continue to use LiveCode for internal rapid prototyping however for large scale deployment battery life is clearly an issue.
> 
> Dr Rod McCall
> Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT)
> The University of Luxembourg
> www.securityandtrust.lu<http://www.securityandtrust.lu><http://www.securityandtrust.lu>
> Twitter: rodlux blog: www.rodmc.com<http://www.rodmc.com><http://www.rodmc.com>
> 
> 
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