Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

Re:Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use by mwcampbell on Saturday April 04, 2015 @03:36PM (#9321913)

Xamarin and Qt are very different.

Xamarin provides a managed runtime environment (Mono) and a way to call native iOS and Android APIs from that environment. Xamarin Forms builds on top of those things to provide a cross-platform UI toolkit that uses the native controls on each platform.

Qt is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that draws its own controls using each platform's low-level graphics facilities. As such, the controls in a Qt-based application aren't fully native to each platform. Qt tries to mimic the native controls, but the emulation isn't completely faithful. A particular problem is accessibility for users with disabilities, e.g. blind users who need to use a screen reader. Last time I checked (several months ago), Qt didn't implement the accessibility APIs for iOS or Android at all.

Because of the non-native nature of Qt, I would strongly recommend avoiding it in favor of something like Xamarin or RubyMotion.

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Re:Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use by discreteevent on Saturday April 04, 2015 @09:48PM (#9322841)

Thanks for that. The application I'm looking at has a very specialized ui. The functionality also counts for much more than native look and feel from the customers point of view so Qt might still be a runner.

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