The clever bunnies over at Marmalade Technologies have today released an awesome new piece of open source technology called Marmalade Juice that I have no doubt many iOS developers will be thrilled to hear about. Catchy name aside, what is this Marmalade Juice technology all about and what can it do for iOS developers? Lets take a quick look at what is says on the tin.
“Marmalade Juice is a new and innovative technology which gives developers the ability to recompile their iOS projects natively for Android. And, because there is no need for laborious re-writing, you can focus on making your game the best it can be.”
So what does that mean? In essence it means that you can take your existing Objective-C XCode code base, compile and run it on the Android platform. As Marmalade Juice is an evolving technology there are a few areas that Juice does not currently fully support, but using the already existing Marmalade extensions you can still utilise them with a little code rework. Not much to ask considering that its infinitely easier than learning the Java / Android development ecosystem, oh and don’t get me started on Eclipse!
So in essence Marmalade Juice equates to easy porting from iOS to Android (that’s over 1 billion extra devices to target your games at!) for iOS developers around the world and an extra revenue stream, which is always nice for budding indie developers and the big boys alike.
All you need to get going is Marmalade Juice, XCode and the Android SDK.
Oh, even more great news. Juice will now be included in all Marmalade licenses and for a limited amount of time the yearly community license is free, so you get to play with Juice for free!
Interested? then mosey on over to the Marmalade Juice web site and grab a license whilst its free.