To my mind the single most impressive thing about Creo (so far) is the design experience. The "Everything is an object" concept is fantastic, the data-binding tool for wiring-up API data is certainly one of the best out there and....Creo even supports Sketch importing. What's not to love?
Well, hopefully nothing - but I have my concerns.
The 'rapid app development' and 'low code' space is already crowded and getting more so each day. I'm not talking about the hundreds of 'get your app running in 5 minutes with our simple RSS building blocks' - I mean NativeScript, Ionic, Appery, Screendy, Appgyver, Appcelerator...all offer highly visual tools for doing what Creo hopes to achieve. This week another one was announced in the guise of ReactStudio and there are bound to be many others I've missed.
These tools can be run on Mac, Windows & Linux. Creo is just Mac (which is perfectly fine by me, but....) They are also based on existing web technologies (JS, TS, React, Angular, nodeJS...) which from a development point of view means using existing, transferrable skills. Also they can draw upon hundreds of thousands (!) of existing free & commercial modules via npm, Github, PhoneGap....to easily add app functionality without having to develop from scratch. I have yet to read an answer to my other post asking about any module support in Creo.
So there you go - in my humble opinion Creo offers a best-in-class design experience with effective API binding - two things that are critical to any modern mobile app dev tool. But do we really need another new coding framework (Gravity)? What is really that wrong with Typescript or JavaScript that the world already knows? And how attractive is a tool going to be if it can't leverage the vast array of existing commercial and free code modules that the world is used to calling on?
Genuinely excited about the upcoming b5 release but again, in my opinion, Creo needs to embrace existing open technologies in order to succeed, not try re-inventing wheels which already spin perfectly well for 99% of the planet. We'll see.
Steve