Hi I am looking to make an app for android or ios, and my coding skills are limited. I can grasp Html but anything too complex or the idea of learning java is impossible for me even though I wish it was a skill I could possess.


I have done some searching and mostly what I find is different very well polished app building sites that charge (imo a lot) for backend services and/or hosting. For this project since it is not intended to be something for profit It is just something I or my group would pay whatever small costs would be. The app is soemthing that would be used by myself and other members in my bonsai club. What I see a need for is an app for catalogging indexing and tracking records of our trees. MOstly just text and the need to upload photos from the phones camera or the web and a very important thing would be some way to save this to a source other than the phone. There are a couple of apps that would fit the bill but they do not have this feature, I just imagine someone losing a phone and thus losing years worth of documentation. This sort of process could be done by sending a file to the user's computer it could be only readable by the app but more ideally it would be transferred into some sort of file that could be easily read and managed on the computer as well, less ideally it could be that it would be uploaded and held indefinitely by a server I would have to pay for.


I do not really have any techie friends atm or I would at least start there trying to get led in the right direction but I figured I would check here to see if anyone had some advice.


Thanks

This post was edited by boscology1 on Feb 2 2016 06:28pm

you're likely not gonna write it yourself, and if you dont have the money to hire a service / etc to do it for you, i suggest trying to repurpose another app. for example, create a facebook account. you can add pictures, tag them, date them, add descriptions. you can connect with your group and make a shared page or whatever. or look into blogging apps. you can backup your photos via dropbox / google drive / whatever apple's shit is.

Cool, thanks for the reply. I have looked at a ton of app making software and I think theyre all garbage and expensive. I think I might want to make the investment if a strong app that will stand the test of time and so I am now looking at hiring someone to code it (have started contacting and talking to some people on fiverr) I have so far gotten a quote from a few and prices seem non-prohibitive. I want to make this ancient yet emerging hobby stronger because when you love something you should also be a leader and try to make it stronger and share it with others.

The old timers in my club and the hobby have 3-ring binders which they carry that have photographs showing sometimes 20-30 years in progress. I see the need for tools for the current generation and next generation who are more inclined to do things digitally so I want it to end up being very functional, minimalistic yet complex. As I keep going I come up with more and more ideas that are increasingly complex that I would like to add to the app so I am looking to create something with a strong foundation that can be built on as it grows.

I am inspired by others who not only have passion but the insatiable need to share it with others.


Have a wonderful day!

I used Jquery Mobile for my first app. That in unison with AJAX calls for my server side needs, it was fairly straight forward.

look into phonegap, it allows you to create mobile applications using web languages (html,css,js). an alternative to phonegap would be ionic or ionic framework. i believe ionic even has a drag and drop interface for ui creation called ionic creator.