... it's great! I have been developing apps for the iPhone for about a month now and have 2 in the App Store. I created them both using AppMakr however this week they have just announced that they are going to be charging ($79 PER APP PER MONTH!!!) for their service so I started to look elsewhere. A lot of AppMaker users are doing the same and one mentioned Buzztouch on the AppMkr forum so I thought I would give it a try yesterday. Bearing in mind that I am very new to app making, so far I have found Buzztouch excellent. In many ways the functions offered are better than the AppMakr ones and in others they seem more limited, however the fact that you can play with the source code on Xcode is brilliant , and I imagine this means that actually you can customise everything much more. AppMakr is quite limited but users are encouraged to use PhoneGap to create much more sophisticated screens. Phone Gap allows you to create pages for apps in HTML (I think it was created to transfer web apps to native apps). I also used JQTouch which uses HTML and CSS to create a very cool UI. I was worried that all I had learnt using Phone Gap and JQTouch would now be in vein if I start using Buzz Touch, but no! You can create a screen in Buzztouch that displays a webpage, so all you need to do is host all the files you need to create a JQTouch and/or PhoneGap page yourself, link to that URL and it works perfectly! Still learning but thought I would share this as there may be others in the same situation.

Welcome! You won't regret joining bt. I've tried most of the other app makers out there and nothing comes close to it. Not only is it so easy to build apps, it also gives you an understanding of how the code works, to the extent that I can now build simple apps from scratch in eclipse, something that I would have thought completely impossible a few months ago! And as you pointed out, the code is 100% flexible. The functions that you say are limited can be customised in any way that your capabilities allow. And it's free!

Hear hear, what Melon head said!

Buzz touch is one of the best services ive ever used, and i did i mentioned it FREE(best part)

Welcome Sepala, thanks for the update. Very cool! Personally I'm very interested in learning more about phonegap. Any good links or info, you think would spply to BT users, do post any time.

@ThomasB thanks! As I said I have only been doing this for a month but I used PhoneGap a bit in creating this app: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/trek-nepal/id480765903?mt=8 I used PhoneGap to get the GPS data from the device and display it, but it can be used to access a load of other device functions like creating and saving a contact into the phones contact list, and accessing the devices accelerometer. All of the functions are listed here: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.2.0/index.html PhoneGap is free and can be downloaded here: http://phonegap.com/ For the styling I used JQTouch which is quite easy to use with PhoneGap and is free too: http://jqtouch.com/ I am new to all this but hope this helps!

hmmmm...? Genuine thread or cunning advert for other services?

its a genuine thread. I saw the notice that appmakr has changed from free to paid... There are threads over there of people looking for other solutions..

Fair enough. I just checked out the site. Seems like very shabby treatment of their users.

Well, Appmaker is facing a problem, which is, it costs a lot of money to run their service, how do they recoup their costs? They aren't millionaires, just average people trying to pay their mortgage like the rest of us. 79 dollars a month really isn't much at all if you look at what it costs to run a server or buy a gallon of milk for your kids these days :) So the Appmaker people are tryinig to monetize by charging a monthly fee. I respect that. This also brings up another important issue, which is, how are the Buzztouch folk going to continue paying their bills for this service. I doubt they can can afford to keep giving this away for free forever. Personally I do not want them to go broke...far from it. I want them to do well, so that this model is secure and grows, and so I can grow with it it. We all have a huge stake in seeing that these kind of services succeed...which means, somehow, they have to make some money. My 2 cents.

Pricing has been talked about before. Also with BT Server it will work closely similar to the wordpress way of things (open source, plugins, self-hosted) ... more or less: Check this: http://www.buzztouch.com/forum/thread.php?tid=93FBAA624DE503D4C59FCC8

Yep thats good stuff. Looking forward to getting some of those custom plug ins!

Well said Thomas. BT's pricing model is not out yet, but they do plan on it in the future. Which should be a no brianer for most people. But going back to Appmaker, they are now charging $79.00/month per APP. Thats a little extreme. That's crazy. And the flexibility with them is no where near BT's. Long live BT.