You can get most of the benefits of an iPhone application without writing a single line of Objective C. An open source project called PhoneGap lets your wrap your website in iPhone App goodness. And you can even charge for your creation.
Even more exciting than being able to easily create an app is getting access to some native iPhone APIs. Currently PhoneGap supports JavaScript access to the user’s location and the device accelerometer. Camera and vibration are still in the works.
There’s talk of being able to use a web form to create your app by submitting only the URL of your website. Currently, it’s a little more work, but easier than creating an app from scratch. You’ll still need to download the SDK and write your app in Apple’s XCode. The PhoneGap wiki has a hello world tutorial that should get you started.
One really cool aspect of the PhoneGap project is that it also supports Android and Blackberry. A write-once approach to mobile development is within grasp of the ordinary web developer.
The developer of an online game-building platform is switching from Java to Flash. The reason? Users don’t want Java.
“Up front, I’ll say that the reason we are moving to Flash is because of Java’s adoption rates. It is not, in fact, because of the language itself but because of Java’s deployment model. We suspect that we lose somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of users due simply to the fact that we are in Java.”
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to load applets on the web. They are slow and prone to crashing. To be fair, the same could be said of other technologies, including Flash. Java tends to get more than its equal share of criticism, for what I’d call legitimate reasons.
Still, Java has been embraced for most mobile game development, excluding the iPhone. Google’s Android open development platform uses Java. Sun estimates that its Micro Edition of Java is deployed on billions of devices.
So, is Flash the answer? Flash has been popular for creating web-based games. Adobe’s Flex framework has made programming Flash easier, giving developers a more standard environment than a timeline. But Dale Beerman, the developer making the leap to Flash, admits Java’s development environment is still “years ahead” of Flash.
Flash is also mostly unproven as a mobile language. Apple has not allowed it on the iPhone, apparently over worries of battery life. Adobe announced that it has an iPhone version ready to go, should Apple change its mind. So, Flash is getting some mobile love.
The iPhone, of course, has its own development framework, based on Objective C. There are major benefits to developing for a device as well-loved as the iPhone. Unlike Java and Flash, games written for the iPhone cannot be used elsewhere.
As we said recently, mobile casual games are going to be big. There will always be multiple platforms, but the fight for number one is still in the early rounds. Do you think it’s fair to rag on Java? Is Flash a viable alternative? Or, will all the world eventually have an iPhone?
The more iPhones that are purchased (and there have been about 5 million 3G models sold), the fewer owners are early adopters. That means apps will become more mainstream. The trend in desktop gaming appears to be holding true for iPhone: casual games rule.
Though action games, which take advantage of the iPhone accelerometer, are quite popular, so are simple, graphics-light games that can be played in short bursts, but are also incredibly addictive. Bejeweled remains popular for paid apps, and four of the top free apps are games, including my new favorite, Trace.
The game at first appears a lot like Line Rider, a classic Flash game where you draw a course then watch your player move along it. Trace takes it a step further, as you avoid obstacles in order to finish each level.
The controls are way simple: you can move left and right, as well as jump. As for drawing your path, you can create or erase lines with the tip of a finger. With those few commands, much can be done. I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit playing Trace. And unfortunately for me, the app keeps track of the time.
I expect games like these to continue to grow in popularity on the iPhone, as the general public recognizes it’s a device worth the price. The iPhone is capable of graphics less childish than Trace’s crayon look, but mobile devices–and the ever popular casual games–don’t require a pretty face.
Google’s Android mobile operating system was made available under an open source license Tuesday morning.
Android leapfrogged the release of T-Mobile’s G1 smartphone, the first commercial device powered by Android, by one day. The G1 will go on sale Wednesday at T-Mobile retail stores. Under a special arrangement, T-Mobile downtown San Francisco store will have the G1 phones for sale on Tuesday night — 11 hours earlier than the rest of the country. Watch Wired.com’s Gadget Lab for coverage of the G1 launch.
The Android code was released largely under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
According to the Android website, Tuesday’s release “offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.” Among the features accessible via those APIs are the speech recognition engine, some software development tools and virtual libraries. There’s also embedded Linux (the system was built using the Linux kernel). Not to be confused with Android’s software development kit (SDK), the toolset used to build individual applications which was released earlier this year, Tuesday’s source code release offers the operating system code — the actual software which runs the applications.
While this is a major development for open-source mobile software, don’t get too excited about abandoning your current mobile OS just yet. The Android code is available to all takers, but the process of installing it on the market’s current crop of smartphone devices is still hit-or-miss. For those of us eager to install the operating system on our own phones, the burden of adapting Android’s OS to our phones is on us. Accommodating the hardware, from the camera to the keyboard (or lack of one), is entirely up to cell phone developers and developers — with Google’s support, of course. Google is openly courting developers to suggest and contribute new features.
For those without that level of commitment, you’re going to have to wait until someone else does it for you, which can mean months or years before you get a chance to run Android reliably on your phone. That is, unless you buy T-Mobile’s G1 phone or whatever device arrives next.
The implications of an open source mobile stack are endless. Android was designed from the beginning to run on a variety of mobile devices. It opens up the software for manipulation at the creative whim of any mobile software designer. From that point of view, the version you’ll find on the G1 device is basically the bare-bones version of the operating system. However, whatever future mobile OS utopia that’s signaled by this release will take some time to arrive.
Since Google’s code is being released under an Apache open source license, we can expect to see multiple branches of the bare-bones version. For example, branches will most likely pop up for each of the major cellphone providers. Similarly, Android’s openness grants Google an interesting competitive advantage against other mobile OS providers like Nokia, RIM and Apple. If history is any indicator, mobile software companies have found it difficult to match the speed at which the open source community develops and updates its software. If the developer army behind the open source community embraces Android’s code (and the mobile industry watches in wonder to see if it will), we’re likely to see new advancements within Android appear quickly, adding pressure to competitors to play catch-up. Nokia has already latched on to Google’s strategy by snatching up the Symbian operating system, which runs on most of its phones, and intending to release it under an open source license as well. By contrast, Apple and RIM, which makes the BlackBerry, argue the control they maintain over their software offers greater stability.
The location based social network, Brightkite has release an iPhone app. The company recently posted the video preview above which shows the very slick looking app in action.
As Adam pointed out in his coverage of WhereCamp PDX, one of the big problems with location-aware apps is the need to manually update your info. While Brightkite’s iPhone app doesn’t eliminate that need, it does make it pretty simple — just open the app and it’ll automatically figure out where you are and offer to update your Brightkite account.
Once Brightkite knows where you and your iPhone are, the app offers all the same features of the site — find friends nearby, see what other users are up to and more — in a nice, iPhone-sized interface.
The new app is free and you can download it from the iTunes App Store (App Store link).
You can get most of the benefits of an iPhone application without writing a single line of Objective C. An open source project called PhoneGap lets your wrap your website in iPhone App goodness. And you can even charge for your creation.
Browse Our Tutorials
Cheat Sheets
Color Charts
Cut & Paste Code