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Decisions, Decisions…

We have been thinking for a while in creating a simple mobile application to show our potential clients what we can do in terms of application development and Drupal integration.

We wanted to keep it simple but in the end, we also wanted to have a very high quality application.

In the past, we have experimented and developed cross platform HTML applications using Phonegap and other technologies, but neither we or our clients have been entirely satisfied with the final product, a lot of issues arise, like: The application is not fast enough, there are some javascript errors that are very hard to debug, plugin support for GPS, accelerometer, and other devices is not always the best, and the look of the final application looks like it does not fully belong there, even when there are great designers putting hard work on the UI / UX side.

That is why we started to think in building native applications for each OS, but we do not have the time or the people in order to pull this out successfully, that was, until we heard about Xamarin.

For those of you who have not heard about it, Xamarin is a company co-founded by Miguel de Icaza, that allows to code applications for each mobile platform, using C#. It has native bindings for the entire API of each platform, and you can do pretty much everything you would do programming it in Objective-C (iOS) or Java (Android).

So after playing with it a while, we felt confident about building this app, and learning new things for our client’s mobile applications.

Drupal and Xamarin, building the Axai mobile application: Part 2