Posts Tagged ‘appcelerator’

Although it may be seen as something rather familiar, Apple’s AppStore and the technological revolution and business model it has undoubtedly generated, have been with us for only 3 years now. In all this time, many of us have tried to get our teeth into some development technologies, with limited success, in order to apply them to cutting-edge mobile devices, particularly to those from Apple’s brand: iPod Touch (yes, it is still there!), iPhone and iPad. We are all familiar with such words as XCode, iOS, Cocoa, Objective-C, Java, Eclipse, Android, Flash, .NET, C/C++. Different languages, different development environments, different paradigms and different learning curves… ultimately, a widely heterogeneous technological scenery, where trying to bet on a winning horse turns out to be a very difficult mission, if not impossible, not only because most probably none of them will end up becoming the killer device, a benchmark in standards for other mobile devices, but also because we need to accept that it is good for everyone that this diversity exists as well as, of course, the strong competition it generates.

However, if we are to be practical, what interests us developers in our work is —or at least what should interest us— is to get an optimum level of efficiency: maximum impact at the lowest cost and with the best quality. Cheap and cheerful, yeah! And, of course, with such a wide and varied range of development technologies around, one doesn’t know where to head to; if one decides to boldly go forth and plunge into all of them at the same time, one of two is happening, either one has ‘plenty of money to spend’, or is exceptionally intelligent and with a lot of time to spare (that is, with no family, no friends, no hobbies necessary for a good mental health …) in all likelihood his or her personal or professional project will end up in failure, or, what is worse, it’s doomed to indifference and failure on the Internet. Of course it could end up well in some cases, but it won’t be definitely easy (as it was not 3 years ago).

And it is here indeed where one stops to reflect on what has been learnt and think: How can I get my praiseworthy and humble objective without die trying?, that is, how can I develop the next cross-platform Killer App that will retire me from work and earn me fame, endless wealth and a complete catalogue of related merchandising? Well, I am sorry, I don’t have the answer, perhaps in another blog near here … Meanwhile I suggest you take advantage of your technological inertia, gained in the last few years. Doing what? Well, simply benefiting from your —or others’— skills and knowledge on web development and all the things that you know, that you master and, most of all, that you like (HTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, JSON…) so this finally becomes your best tool for the development of applications, only this time not just for the Web.

Yes, this is possible with relatively little effort and great accomplishment in a few days (even hours!!) though this, like everything, has a trick. You will again encounter many options and you will spend little time sleeping and plenty of time searching, reading, learning, testing, installing… until finally you can see some light at the end of the tunnel. And that is the reason we are here, we are here to help you identify the Web technology that best suits your knowledge and your needs and, if possible, we can help you pave the way for and materialize that idea you’ve had in mind for months and that, due to a lack of time, you’ve been unable to fulfill.

In this blog we’ll be talking about 100% Web browser-based applications, quite similar to the ones that the very same Apple was trying to convince us some time ago that were the future for the development of mobile devices —and which the worldwide developer community set out to demonstrate that was not exactly like that, thus pressing Apple itself to publish its SDK. Here you will find all guides and libraries from Apple, and libraries as complete and powerful such as jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. I must say, to be honest, that in the end not only did Apple realize its mistake and ended up freeing its SDK (we could spend hours talking about how good and timely this decision was) but it also eventually gave green light to the development of iOS applications without making us toe the line of XCode, Cocoa and Objective-C; maybe this was more out of fear of competition than understanding that the most important thing is the creativity of the developers and not the tools they build their applications with. We’ll also talk about native cross-platform applications, about their features, advantages and drawbacks, such as those generated by Adobe Flex Builder or some of the latest trends in mobile development with Web technologies —mainly Javascript— which mean no less than a true revolution due to their simplicity and power (even though they are still relatively immature software pieces). We are referring to PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium.

As stated, we shall start by reviewing each one of the three proposed areas as options to develop mobile applications by means of technologies ‘traditionally’ aimed at and used for the Web.