Android GURPS character generator

[Wraithe]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I REALLY think we should aim for an official MacOS one before we start looking at the newer portables.

This is an excellent point. In fact, once you got one for Mac OS X, you're most of the way to an iOS one.

I LOVE GURPS Character Sheet, mind you, and I'd love to see that become "Official", even though it gets us no closer to an iPad app.

[ClayDowling]

The correct answer probably lies somewhere around C or C++, which is the language used in common by the iOS and Android platforms. Not that C++ is an officially supported language, but people have managed to build and run C++ programs on Android, using a java wrapper.

Downside, both the GCA and GCS developers agree that C++ gives them hives.

[ClayDowling]

Actually, a little googling just showed me Qt apps running on both an ipod touch and an Android device. The Android ports aren't official yet, but if I get crackin' now they'll probably be available by the time I'm done.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

The correct answer probably lies somewhere around C or C++, which is the language used in common by the iOS and Android platforms. Not that C++ is an officially supported language, but people have managed to build and run C++ programs on Android, using a java wrapper.

Downside, both the GCA and GCS developers agree that C++ gives them hives.

C++ is officially supported in Android. It's the way to get some extra performance for performance-critical applications. Now, the thing is, the performance gain isn't that huge, and you have much bigger problems with fragmentation: Not only you've got to contend with multiple OS versions and screen resolutions, but also with multiple architectures (ARMv6 vs ARMV7 vs x86), since the native code isn't processor agnostic like the Dalvik VM bytecode.

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

Actually, a little googling just showed me Qt apps running on both an ipod touch and an Android device. The Android ports aren't official yet, but if I get crackin' now they'll probably be available by the time I'm done.

Well, personally, I like the default UI widgets, and I think that you could build a decent UI out of them. I'm trying to grok how to define the GUI in the XML file, but I'm a long time member of the "build the GUI by hand, instead of using those GUI designers" school of coding, and I'm finding it hard. I know I could simply write the GUI in the code, but everyone recommends against it.

Now Qt on Android would work, maybe, and ease building cross-platform apps, but still, I'm not yet sold on it.

[RafaelLVX]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I REALLY think we should aim for an official MacOS one before we start looking at the newer portables.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't people already use Windows programs through emulation on OS X? Like they do with Wine on Linux? I'm really OSX-ignorant mostly.

Back to portable devices, I read there are a few HTML-based cross-platform free frameworks for developing easily for Android, iOS and other systems. I'm not a real programmer, but I can pull out some tricks on web developing, I'll start studying Appcelerator Titanium this weekend (that is, if my slow home internet connection allows me to download all the Android SDK APIs, which I can't download from work because it will stupidly only come through the already installed program).

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by RafaelLVX

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't people already use Windows programs through emulation on OS X? Like they do with Wine on Linux? I'm really OSX-ignorant mostly.

With the same user-unfriendly and unstable results, yes. I really wouldn't call that a "solution" - it's a work-around at best. As far as I know, the MacOS solution is a commerical product that also requires a Windows license too (I could be wrong, or there could be alternatives that I don't know about - I don't have a Mac so I couldn't say).

Wine is notoriously delicate on Linux, that's for sure, and a performance hit.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Bruno

With the same user-unfriendly and unstable results, yes. I really wouldn't call that a "solution" - it's a work-around at best. As far as I know, the MacOS solution is a commerical product that also requires a Windows license too (I could be wrong, or there could be alternatives that I don't know about - I don't have a Mac so I couldn't say).

Wine is notoriously delicate on Linux, that's for sure, and a performance hit.

Nah, chargen works under WINE just fine, except for two things:

• Forget about using your keyboard to quick-find a trait by its first letter.
• Forget about using non-ASCII letters in trait or character names (not that this would bother an Anglophone).

[prospero]

Given that GURPS-savvy OSX and iOS developer resources are clearly rather scarce and that GCS does a pretty good job on OSX, I'm not sure if we need to put the time into developing an OSX-native character generator. Why not develop directly for iOS, and leave the desktop Mac to GCS?

As others have suggested, perhaps some of GCS's code could be leveraged to run on Android. There have been some discussions of this among the GCS community.

[Sparks]

Originally Posted by prospero

Given that GURPS-savvy OSX and iOS developer resources are clearly rather scarce and that GCS does a pretty good job on OSX, I'm not sure if we need to put the time into developing an OSX-native character generator. Why not develop directly for iOS, and leave the desktop Mac to GCS?

Honestly, I think what would make sense is using the .gcs files that GCS generates as a sort of standard. Get a sort of collective project together; write a program for iOS that handles .gcs files and one for Android, both using Dropbox (or some similar tool) to be able to update and send back sheets. That way, you could build the character on GCS, save the file to Dropbox, load it on iPad or Xoom (or a Droid or iPhone), add experience, buy a skill, save, and reload it back on GCS on the desktop later.

As a mobile developer for my day job, and someone who thus has Way Too Many Devices, I'd love to be able to load up a .gcs sheet on my iPad or eee Pad without having to save it as a PDF and just mark it up in iAnnotate or similar tools.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Sparks

Honestly, I think what would make sense is using the .gcs files that GCS generates as a sort of standard. Get a sort of collective project together; write a program for iOS that handles .gcs files and one for Android, both using Dropbox (or some similar tool) to be able to update and send back sheets. That way, you could build the character on GCS, save the file to Dropbox, load it on iPad or Xoom (or a Droid or iPhone), add experience, buy a skill, save, and reload it back on GCS on the desktop later.

As a mobile developer for my day job, and someone who thus has Way Too Many Devices, I'd love to be able to load up a .gcs sheet on my iPad or eee Pad without having to save it as a PDF and just mark it up in iAnnotate or similar tools.

Given that GCS is written in Java, that .gcs files are xml files, and that Android is programmed using the Java language (though it does not run Java bitecode), it should not be too hard to get some viewer for GCS files running on Android (I plan on trying, if no one gets there before me)