Unity is a game engine, I get that. However, last week I started eating omelettes for breakfast literally everyday because they’re prepared quickly and easily, healthy, and can be modified to be very diverse. I was pretty excited because at work I have so many ingredients to choose from, but it quickly became annoying coming up with unique omelettes. I figured I’d spend like two hours developing a generator that I could add all my ingredients to and click generate once every morning or something. I used Unity because it’s all I know and I had no intentions of publishing.
Making it was more challenging and time consuming than I thought. I learned a lot and I kept coming up with more ideas to add to it. At this point, it has evolved from a simple tool that solved my very unique issue to a very useful tool for creating, generating and cataloging recipes, and I have many more ideas to make it the ultimate program for cooks and bakers and the like. I was even considering making an IOS/Android version.
Anyways, I’m concerned that people will criticize my having developed it with Unity when the splash screen appears, and on top of that I don’t know how or where to publish non-game desktop applications. I also thought that maybe there could be some other issues involved, like does Unity want non-game applications associated with their game engine? I wouldn’t think they’d care…
Anyways, if you have anything to say on the matter I’d be interested.
Your main issue will be battery drain. You CAN develop apps with unity, but generally you shouldn’t. If you’re using GUI, there are better tools (one of them is Qt framework)
if you are looking at app development you may want to look at xamarin, It still uses .net and c# like unity but also has a nice native UI for each platform and is way better on battery. I have a few years unity experience and this only took me a week to get to grips with.
I developed a lap timer application with Unity using the gps to measure your time on track.
That works perfectly on WindowsPhone, Android and iPhone, and no battery problem.
Honestly, I’d ditch the project before I started developing with a new framework, but Xamarin and Qt are very interesting.I intend to start learning the former immediately, and I was going to get into C++ eventually so Qt might be useful to me as well.
I’d also throw NativeScript out there, been checking it out recently and I’m digging it. If you’re in any way familiar with the node ecosystem you’ll feel right at home.
I’m gonna disagree with some other fellows here. My gut says go with what you know. I’ve a handful of non-game apps made with Unity and I earned my $100s back on the App Store this year. Was totally worth it.
As I understand it, all of these other programs are solid platforms to develop from. But if Unity is what you know, use it.
For me, I don’t put much worry in to a drained battery because my apps are generally only used for less than a minute at a time anyway.