Cross-platform without fuss

So I started to explore where I was at with regards to looking beyond iPhone.

This is full circle for this blog because when I’d started it I was on Pixel for a while before getting back to my iPhone 13 mini (long may it last, and *Clicks **where is my Power Keyboard that I preordered?*).

My focus first on iPhone was because I (somewhat rightly) felt that was where it would be **most likely to fail **being where I had the least experience.

Then came my discovery that MapKit is practically free and somewhat unmetered compared to Google Maps on Android. But that’s not going to be all apps that need that.

To get to iOS on Briefcase, you practically do macOS, so there’s that. From there I moved to my Chromebook. This is Linux plus Android.

Leaving only Windows. Well I do have my work laptop or a virtual machine…

I am tossing up replacing my Intel Mac Mini with an Apple Silicon one, or a Mac laptop. Virtual macOS isn’t really going to cut it, on functionality and price.

Any of that depends on a proof-of-concept.

On the UI front, ie, *Toga, *I was very impressed. Having started with one of the most limited platforms it was very seamless to bring over an app to all of the platforms.

The hardest thing is unifying the icons - but (Gemini and) Pillow helped with that.

Of course I *have created my own platform sensitive traps along the way and because I was using “the escape hatch” into *Rubicon quite a bit I still have some changes to make to get something functional.

The equivalent “escape hatch” on Android is via chaquopy (not from Beeware) and that is another bit of learning and it too is a bit curious in how it tries to seamlessly blend in this case Java’s idioms into Python. I’m learning a lot.

I really would like to see the iOS and Android APIs presented in some documentation in Rubicon and chaquopy language - would make things easier (given they are following pattern-based rules this shouldn’t be hard).

So no I haven’t painted myself into a corner yet…
🧩