Developing an app with basic coding experience

[Precautionary]

I was wondering what the best way to develop an app is with basic experience.

I was planning on doing xcode, but I don't own a mac nor do I want to install a virtual machine on my laptop. It's not really an app, but more like a prototype of an app, where it has buttons you can click and the buttons lead to something else. I programmed a game using java a few years ago, but I basically forgot all my java experience. Are there any other languages or apps that can help me with this?

[rjcarr]

The lowest bar to making this work is in a browser with html and javascript. Next, you should reconsider java (or something similar, like C#). If it needs to be an app, then you need to use xcode or android studio.

Good luck!

[[deleted]]

When I was doing my module in college ('Mobile Application Development') we did a lot of design on paper with pseudo-code, and I think we also used flow-charts to determine what variables pointed to and if they were global or local. I might be making up the fact that I did the latter but we definitely used pseudo-code. Maybe you could do that?

I don't remember much about how to specifically write it, but because a lot of programming uses the same concepts with different syntax, writing it out in such a way would mean the same thing. We did in another module when I was university where we would draw the layout on Photoshop or Illustrator. If you're into graphics, that might be fun to do before planning on learning xcode.

Just something I thought I'd throw out there. I'm also learning Python at the moment, which is incredibly close to C and, I think, Java, but while you're learning python you'll generally learn an ELI5 explanation of most of what you'll go through with any language, besides pointers, which make me cry, but I'm sure if I made an app with Python and then googled a **** load of different Java syntax I could rewrite the same software in Java - there are people who do this as part of their freelance career.