#demibooks

[rohlady]

#staystrong #quotes #quotesoftheday #demibooks

[meeadventures]

DEV Tips: To code or not to code...

Well that was the question that haunted me for some time!

I personally come from a development past with a number of programming languages under my belt that I have been exposed to over the years, so coding was indeed an option.

I started my IOS development research and downloaded and played with a number of development platforms including Objective-C even though quite a few had told me I should avoid because it will take too long to get up to speed.

Well, I won't go into too much detail here but I did find that it was taking too much time to be an expert OBJ-C programmer, so I jumped ship and looked for alternatives. After all, my goal was to produce interactive adventure books not so much to become an OBJ-C expert.

Lots of time, frustrations and disappointing experiences later at various levels of development platform I tried, I decided to design and spec out an authoring app and have a software house quote for the development. I was wanting 'speed to market' now as I had wasted too much time going down the evaluation and self-education route. Bang... that blew up in my face too... and it was going to be much too expensive an option.

Feeling slightly despondent... a knight in shining armour came to the rescue... purely by chance I happened on an iPad authoring tool just recently launched which did a lot of what I wanted to accomplish in my authoring of book apps. Not everything, I might add, for my adventure game book but what it did do, it certainly did well and it was so easy to use... and it was free!

The name of this product is Composer by Demibooks. I downloaded it, played around with it and did copious small examples to take it through its paces. This also prompted me to contact the developers through their forums and the responses were refreshingly quick and professional. All in all an impressive bunch. So that's the product I decided to run with.... Update August 2012 ---> and now I am using Composer Pro beta and the story telling world is looking even brighter! It's not perfect for the adventure game book apps I ideally want to do but it gets closer all the time, and the developer and management listen and stay in touch with their users which is really refreshing in the app development world.

For those readers that want to go down the coding route but not Objective-C then I would strongly suggest you have a look at Corona SDK by Ansca mobile and/or LiveCode by RunRev Ltd. Both were the best alternatives that I found in my research. If I have time I might go into their pluses and minuses later in the day.

[meeadventures]

DEV TIP: After much research, trials of many alternative technologies, including coding my own apps, I finally decided to ditch everything and use this great product... I decided I wanted to focus on the creative aspects rather than the technical stuff (which I have spent most of my life doing to date)... I made the right choice, Composer by Demibooks really is a great tool and the people in the company top notch and in touch. (Updated to their latest promo video on Composer Pro).