unity3d for apps, not games

I am considering making a small app for desktop pc’s. I would mainly like to have support for mac and for ubuntu (linux) and I wouldn’t mind support for windows as well. An easy way seems to develop an app using Unity, but it is more known to be an engine for games.

To my simple logic, there should be no reason why an app cannot be built with Unity. A platform that features the ability to create massive laser marine gunbattles should be capable of rending pretty buttons and a user interface. The plus side is that with unity you can port to all platforms that I would like this app to run on as well.

Am I making a bad assumption? Are there any people that have done such things? The app I would like to make might be open source, does the Unity platform limit me in any way here?

I don’t suppose you are the first person to have this idea. Games are just a type of app. The real question is, do you need all the power (overhead) of a game engine to make your app? If your app is pretty much just buttons and user interface, you should probably consider another cross-platform solution (there are many). But if you need game engine features, Unity is great. FWIW I’ve done many apps in 5 years with Unity, none are really ‘games’ per se.

I’m looking down this path because of cross platform capability and the specific nature of my application. In my case it is for a graphic t-shirt design / silk screen company. While Unity is overkill out of the gate, style and look, sound, and perhaps some 3d graphics can actually improve the customer experience. If this was an invoicing app, Unity would not be on the radar.

The big one is cross platform. If I want to have drag and drop t-shirt design, flip the t-shirt over with a cool animation, or perhaps show an avatar of someone wearing the tshirt… that starts to get into some areas where to deploy to all platforms gets more and more challenging.

One major gap however is the lack of any real datagrid control in Unity. NGui is great for just about all the other interface requirements… but without a solid grid control even relatively simple display of data becomes complicated.

I expect someone who could bring something as functional as old school Visual FoxPro/Delphi UI/Access (can’t stand it but I’d sure take the functionality in Unity) designer into Unity it would be a big deal.