Mobile Pundits is a full service provider company that provides strategic, design, development, enterprise, testing and outsourcing services to our clients. Our specialty in product to build awesome apps for mobile and web platforms. The Mobile Pundits team work, where entrepreneurs and start-ups come to grow and be surrounded by like-minded people who are building amazing technology products. With mobile application development turning mainstream, developers are progressively looking at cross-platform mobile application development tools to develop apps using C# to help reduce cost of development and improve time-to-market. Cross-platform mobile application development tools attempt to deliver these benefits by providing a neutral way of writing applications using their own particular language/dialect/tools that is then translated into the multiple forms required for deployment to each mobile platform. These slides learn how to build cross-platform mobile applications using technologies like HTML5, C#, PhoneGap, Adobe Flash Builder, Appcelerator Titanium and Applause.

1. By: Mobile Pundits

2. Overview
 According to the Global Developer Survey ’13 conducted by Telerik, over
5000 developers said that they developed apps using HTML5 in 2012 and
90% of them plan to do so in 2013.
 Only 15% of developers said they would prefer to use a native-only
approach.

3. What Platform Developers Wants?
Tizen
13%
Blackberry 10
36%
Firefox OS
Chrome OS
47%
Windows 8
66%
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70

4. Development Difficulty
Blackberry and iOS are the most difficult platforms to develop for Windows 8
and Windows Phone 8 ranked as the easiest with Android falling in the
middle.

6. Usage
 Apple’s iOS is the leading mobile OS in 30 countries. Canada-83.7%, United
States at 35.2%.
 Android accounts for more than 50% of the mobile web traffic with South
Korea at 78.3% and United States at 23.3%.
 Blackberry is the leading mobile OS in four countries, Dominican
Republic, 57.1% and United States, 32.0%
 Symbian is the leading mobile OS in more than 100 countries, Nokia’s Symbianbased phones are widely used in developing nations. However, it has almost no
foothold in the US market.

7. But HTML5 ?
“I think the biggest mistake that we made as a company is
betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native”
(Mark Zuckerberg, Sept. 2012)
 HTML5 is indeed a great technology and is here to stay
 Promise: write once, run everywhere
 JavaScript engines are getting faster, and you can use JavaScript
on client and server
 But…

8. But HTML5 ?
 You have to program in JavaScript 
 Write once, deploy everywhere not 100% true
 UI paradigms are different on each platform
 No access to native libraries

9. Types of Apps Built Using HTML5
The most important modern web technologies right now include forms and
validation, databases and flexible layouts (grids, flexbox, etc.)

10. But HTML5 ?
iOS
Android
Windows Phone

12. C# As a Multiplatform Alternative
 Mono makes it possible to run C# code on the most widespread
platforms
 All Windows variants
 Linux
 OSX
 iOS
 Android

13. By following the principle of separation of responsibility by layering your
application architecture and then moving core functionality that is platform
agnostic into a reusable core library, you can maximize code sharing across
platforms, as the figure below illustrates:
Architecture Overview

14. C# As a Multiplatform Alternative
 Plus a few nice additions
 Playstation Mobile (PS VITA)
 The Unity 3d Engine uses C# as a scripting language (and
Unity runs on Wii and WiiU, PS3, XBOX, Flash)
 PS4 will definitely run C# code
 BSD, Solaris, Wii, PS3
 CPU architecture is not an issue:
x86, x64, IA64, PowerPC, SPARC, ARM…

15. Useful C# Libraries
 TinyIoC / TinyMessenger
 WaveEngine
 MonoGame (XNA)
 EmguCv (open CV)
 NetTopologySuite
 MVVMCross
 SQLite-Net
 ServiceStack
 Log4Net
 Many more
We have loC containers, MVVM, 2D
and 3D game engines, ORM, Image
processing library, Logging, Web
services, GIS tools…

16. Native UI Layer

17. Key Promise
 Add a feature to the service layer and the other layers do
not have to change
 Create Tasky with out shared data layer
 Introduce new cloud service that syncs list data across
devices after the fact
 Presto: new cloud sync version
 How hard to deploy through the upgrade to shared data.

18. Case Study
 Cross Platform Task Management
 Familiar ground
 Evolves from iPhone, to Android, to shared data with
customer requirements.
 Iterations
 Version 1 is iPhone
 Version 1.1 is Android
 Version 2.0 is Shared Tasks
Communication with backend server (i.e. Promise)
 Version 2.1 is WinPhone


19. Multiplatform Tasky Solution

20. Advantages In Using C#
 Linq / Lamda, Parallel Linq, Tasks
 Memory management (no pointers, but leaks are still a problem)
 Strongly typed implicit variable declaration
 Extension methods
 Strongly typed
 Generics
 WCF
 Async/await
 ReSharper(This applies only if using Visual Studio)

21. Tips & Tricks
 Developing for iOS requires a Mac
 Emulators are good but:
 iOS provides an x86 simulator
 Android provides both ARM and x86 emulators
 iOS deployment still requires the usual certificates and some Xcode
 Memory leaks
 Git support in TFS / Xamarin Studio

22. Conclusion
 It all sounds great, isn’t it?
 Sometimes is not straightforward as it seems
 Relying on semi-closed platform
 Specific platform knowledge is still a must: get ready to learn
some Java and objective-c
 Mobile is not only coding, UI and UX are crucial for a successful
app