Hi there!
What do you think about Unity as a platform for building not only games, but business soft as well?
Would you use it for your soft, tools, media or social application? Have you already tried?
What issues, missing functionality appeared?
I already do. My second ‘non-game’ Unity app should be live on the app-store in a few days (already submitted).
Unity Pros:
- Special effects such as shaders, particles, etc… for whiz-bang
- Ease of development/iteration - C#, edit and continue, vast array of multimedia
- Access to cameras and 3D space for characters and animations
- Cross platform deployment (web, ios, mac, pc, … pretty easy)
Unity Cons:
- TERRIBLE UI/HUD capabilities. Almost ZERO built-in features - requires external tool, which adds expense and is cumbersome
- Non-native plugins - requires separate purchase or development for each platform (ie Flurry, In-App purchases)
- 2D is limited. External tools help, but it’s real issue.
It depends on what you need. It’s definitely NOT the right tool for simple business logic apps - which have massive UI’s.
Gigi.
Missing:
.Net 4.0.
All the awesome goodness of windows forms etc.
Has:
.net3.5
Awesome graphics.
Non-games in general…yes. Simulations, research software, data visualization, art installations…sure.
Business apps…probably not so much, depending on the requirements.
Using Unity for architecture presentations.
There is no awesome goodness of windows forms on Mono
And .NET 4.0 is not fully right. partially it has it and once Mono 2.10 will be fully used (if you check the folder you see its there already for example and as such likely used in some places) it will be .net 4. just without the ‘p’ part logically as allowing auto parallelism in a technology not even async calling safe would be suicidical 
Drr… which is why I put it under ‘missing’ - as in your missing out.
I’d be interested in knowing what exactly u3d supports .net 4.0 wise.
Unity is a 3D engine. It’s not for games only, but you’re not going to make a word processor with it. (Although I have occasionally made small “traditional” apps using Unity for my own use, where it doesn’t really make sense to have a 3D engine hanging off them, but it was quicker to do it that way since that’s what I’m most familiar with these days. And I wasn’t inflicting them on other people. )
–Eric
It’s the wielder that determines a tools effectiveness.
Which is why you use a rock to shave with. Technically it can be done, but why waste all that time and effort?
I wondered about making a web player xml entry form to create/edit xml files in the browser?? I’ve seen it done in flash so figured Unity could do it…
Reminds me of autohotkey, hehe you can write a program(standalone with GUI) in notepad and compile it to an .exe with a custom icon and nobody knows it’s not written in visual studio.
Fantastic!
Gigi
This.
Just as long as you’re not building a spreadsheet app in Unity, it’s forgivable.
Um, yes, exactly. ::throws UniSpreadsheet project in trash::
–Eric
We’ve got an business logic application in mind with quite complicated UI. I’d say it is mostly UI with different data. It is so tempting to implement it in Unity because we are familiar with it, it is cross-platform, and our mvvm tools make it so easy to just link data to corresponding fields and write no code to handle them.
But from other hand, we’ve heard about some performance issues of iGUI, that seem to fit the best because of their controls set.
If we use NData, we’ll need to create all this controls skin ourselves.
What would be your advise?
Is the initial post just a setup to promote your tools (which look great by the way)? 
It seems quite strange to consider using Unity for a business application unless it has a 3d component. I guess if its for internal use or for a limited audience and your team only has Unity skills it could be considered.
Hehe, no, we really have this project to do and really not sure what is the best way to go 
but why not tell about our tools if they are really convenient ;)))
This project we are going to implement is for external use (we’d not hesitate if it was for us only) and has no 3D component, but, yes, team has Unity skills only.
The alternative I see is phonegap with knokout integration (need to check if it is possible). But it’s HTML5 and JavaScript and we are C# guys, so in this case we’ll probably need to find additional developers.
What do you think?
Have you looked at Xamarin, if you are a small company you can use the non-enterprise licensing which will be under $1,000. I’m not much of a .NET guy but I assume there are other alternatives.
Oddly enough a spreadsheet application is one that U3D might be quite suited for
Thank you, JohnnyA, will look at Xamarin more closely, but for first glance probably Unity fits better.
By the way, returning to iGUI, that seems to be good for business soft because of controls, is it true, they they’ve got performance problems and what they are depend on?