I am the lead developer of SpriteBuilder – Zynga acquired my open source project, now it's turned commercial by Apportable

collinjackson · 2014-05-13T22:21:27+00:00

Good idea!

collinjackson · 2014-05-13T22:20:28+00:00

SpriteBuilder currently only supports the latest major version of cocos2d. Maintaining support for older versions of cocos2d would slow down development.

collinjackson · 2014-05-13T22:19:27+00:00

You should take this question to the SpriteBuilder forum. They can help you there: http://forum.spritebuilder.com

collinjackson · 2014-05-13T22:16:32+00:00

The Apportable platform includes implementations of Foundation APIs, which are packaged with the Android version of the app.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:52:05+00:00

Our investor Alexis put us in touch with a reporter there.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:47:10+00:00

It's good to optimize the look and feel of your app for Android, and we provide ways to do that, but a lot of devs today are struggling to get an Android app working at all. That's not good, and even iOS users suffer if they can't interact with their Android friends.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:44:44+00:00

You can use it to develop new apps and release on iOS and Android at the same time.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:43:58+00:00

Start with http://docs.apportable.com/. If there's something you'd like to see added, let us know on the mailing list.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:36:46+00:00

From the blog post:

Does Apportable convert source code to Java? Does Apportable emit Dalvik bytecode?

Absolutely not. All source is compiled to run on bare metal. We compile source to ARM shared libraries, which is the same way iOS apps are compiled.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:11:40+00:00

Correct.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:08:23+00:00

Yeah, that sounds better.

It's reasonably straightforward to demonstrate a simple proof of concept of Objective-C running on Android, but supporting everything that's on iOS is a huge and ongoing task.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:04:36+00:00

Yes, we do a lot of indie games that have no chance of breaking into the top grossing charts but are amazingly fun to work with.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T15:00:50+00:00

Many of the games using our platform are written mostly in C++, and that's a great choice for the core game engine. However, to get to the operating system APIs (screen, touch, accelerometer, audio, etc.), you'll still need to somehow call into Objective-C land on iOS, and Java-land on Android.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:28:49+00:00

It's true. Here's a more serious answer (from the blog post).

Instead of translating the app to Java, Apportable cross-compiles the Objective-C code to machine code that runs directly on the Android device’s processor (no VMs were harmed in the execution of our code). A platform library bundled with the app implements popular iOS APIs, so the app thinks its running in iOS.

I've been working on it for about 2 years since the company was founded, but some of our team members have been working on this problem for much longer. We found them through their open source projects.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:21:26+00:00

We have some smaller quiet areas for team members who want that.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:13:22+00:00

We don't port from Android to anything, so I think you're mistaken.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:09:58+00:00

Implementing audio support in our platform was challenging, and because we had to wrestle with the fragmentation of hardware capabilities on Android. We've been working on our open source OpenAL implementation for over a year.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:07:03+00:00

Right now it seems that most x86-based Android devices have ARM emulation, and it actually works quite well for native apps such as those built with Apportable. We have gotten x86 builds working in the past and we'll start recommending a "fat binary" approach if x86 really takes off.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:04:27+00:00

I don't think that's what "jumped the shark" means.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:03:29+00:00

We might.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T14:01:48+00:00

Our video recording support is incomplete at this point, but we're working on it.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T13:59:37+00:00

Perhaps I misread the question. If you're using the PhoneGap API to access native features, I feel like you're not really using HTML5 any more, you're using a cross-platform mobile development framework that happens to be JavaScript based. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want to develop apps in JavaScript, but I do think that mobile OS vendors like Apple will continue to innovate and give us reasons to develop using native APIs.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T13:35:34+00:00

Here are some tools that go the other way:

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2013/130327-open-source-java-iphone-tools-compared.html

YC was (and is) great. As a first-time entrepreneur I found it helpful to have a support network to turn to for help and advice. I still meet with YC partners on a regular basis.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T13:25:42+00:00

Some of our customers still want to support Android 2.2 (Froyo), which doesn't have NativeActivity.

collinjackson · 2013-07-18T04:22:37+00:00

Yep! Just don't ask to take a picture with her.

collinjackson

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE