[Non-Game] Unity+Noesis for non game crossplatform development

Hello everybody.

We are a small team working on non games commercial apps.

Essentially web and desktop based, we are currently encountring a growth for ios/android tablet development demand from our customers, specially a port from our previous desktop developments to tablet devices.

We are considering the use of Unity/Noesis for one of our project that is build in c#/Wpf/Xaml and have a heavy code base.

Did some of you recently experiment this kind of process ?
Would you recommed Unity/Noesis over Cordova ?

 

Personally, I've never like Cordova based applications. They feel like thinly-wrapped websites, and they're always just a little bit "off" - small pauses, etc - things that you wouldn't notice on a web page, but that make an app feel just a tad bit wrong.
Not sure about noesis gui, why that would be interesting. Holds no interest to me anyway, and whenever someone touts "Uses XAML!!!", i always read that to mean "Requires you to hand-code and hand-tune features without visual feedback!!!".

 

Thanks for your feedback Jaimi.

Our original desktop application uses lots of XAML design, principally for some complex visual hierarchical representation (think about a 2D engeenering design framework).

That said, using XAML we can re-use our already done XAML design (well... more "adapt" than reuse) and also that our main knowhow is XAML based for GUI.

In some way, Noesis can be very interresting for teams that are used to work with "conventional" application developement based on XAML more than games ; our team know better how to align things in XAML than inside the unity scene view, also all of our tools are suited to XAML (visual studio/blend...) , not uGUI (..which is great, since the 4.6 release !)

and also ; there is currently no technical solution providing developper the ability to develop cross-platform using c# and XAML, except noesis.

This can be a big + for Unity on any kind of crossplatform development, not specially games.

 

Why no visual feedback when you have tools (free) like Blend?

 

For simple design, visual feedback should work in Blend, as long as you include noesis dependencies (I must admit we didn't tried because most of our gui is already done). I don't know right inside Visual Studio, maybe.

But when you come to complex forms that are mostly generated with codebehind, you won't have visual feedback, in any case (whatever technical solution you choose, even with uGUI).

It's normal, as it's run-time generated.

 

If you avoid code-behind and use data binding instead you can achieve two interesting things:

• You can create dummy contexts in Blend that allow you to tweak your GUI
• If you bind to properties of Unity components, you can change those values using the editor and tweak while in Play mode