Tablet AB

[deFl0]

I see the conversation is definitely underway for tablet/phone versions of the product, and hard choices are being made over the choice of which operating system to develop for.

But why are you not building the code once and pushing it out through something like rhomobile so that is works on all platforms at once?

I only bring it up because you see Android tablet and mobile platforms collapsing into single code sets with Ice cream sandwich and true I pad competitors like the Asus Transformer Prime coming to the market.

The tablet war is really just about to start and the majority of mobile phones are evenly split between Android and iOS.

 

[Colen]

Thanks for your post! Unfortunately doing a tablet version using this cross-platform framework would require us to spend time writing *more* code, not less.

With "rhomobile" and the other similar ones like Phonegap and so on, you create your application in html5. For us that means abandoning our entire existing codebase and rewriting everything, then maintaining two copies forever. Maintaining one copy of code is hard enough - if we try to keep two different versions of the same app in sync, it's just going to cause big problems for us.

If we were starting and writing an app from scratch, this would definitely be a good thing to check out, as we wouldn't have the problem of the legacy codebase to work with. But since we do, the html5-based app designers aren't really a good choice for us.

One of the reasons our Mac version of Hero Lab works so consistently with the PC version is that we're reusing all of the same code for the important bits - the Hero Lab engine and so on. We'll do the same with Army Builder once we're done with Hero Lab. If we were having to rewrite the whole thing, we'd end up with something much buggier and less useful, and it'd take a lot longer to bring to market.