Category Archives: development

adobe, apple, development, mobile, professional

Mobile development research shows complex picture

Vision Mobile has published its report on mobile development. It is a detailed report and worth reading, though I would be wary about taking it too seriously since some of the results are puzzling. This is what the report is based on:

We spent the last few months quizzing developers and industry executives about the future of mobile. Our research included 20+ industry executives, along with 900+ developers from 75+ countries working on 8+ major platforms.

There are a few surprises. Android fragmentation is generally regarded as a problem, particularly since operators are slow or reluctant to release updates, but according to the report Android is the least fragmented platform after Apple iOS; the worst is Java ME.

Here are a couple of charts I found interesting. What kinds of apps are people paying for?

image

Source: Developer Economics 2011

It is games that dominate, but at 45% they are still less than half of the whole. Note that these stats are based on iOS sales tracked by App Annie.

In terms of monetisation, iOS is the most revenue-generating platform according to the report, and Android well down.

image

Source: Developer Economics 2011

Windows Phone is too small to make this list, but the report notes:

Windows Marketplace offers a trial version for applications, which doesn’t help developers monetise from impulse purchases – a
naive differentiation move on the part of Microsoft.

There is a fascinating section on winners and losers in the mobile platform race. There is almost no correlation between number of devices shipped and the number of apps published.

image

Source: Developer Economics 2011

Java ME is way ahead on devices shipped; but these are feature phones for a market that buys relatively few apps.

Finally, a look at the platforms developers are planning to use, and the ones that plan to abandon. Here is the first:

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Source: Developer Economics 2011

I am not sure what to  make of this one. 621 developers were surveyed, and placed Android top, Windows Phone 2nd, Chrome OS third, and iOS level pegging with MeeGo in fourth place. I could almost believe it if it means which additional platforms, since many will already be developing for iOS. I wonder if the question was clearly put?

Next comes a chart of platforms developers are planning to abandon:

image

Source: Developer Economics 2011

Bad news for Symbian and Java ME, and also uncomfortable reading for HP with webOS and Adobe with Flash. However, only 285 respondents for this part of the survey.

There are harsh words for Adobe. The report gives several reasons why Flash is losing the battle for developer mindshare, including the abandonment of Flash Lite and the perception that “by focusing on large business partners, Adobe has been unable to cultivate momentum among developers in the long-tail.”

Microsoft is praised for its developer tools, but the decline of Windows Mobile and “lacklustre sales” for Windows Phone raise questions over whether it can create a viable market for mobile developer. The report is not always clear about when it means Windows phones of all kinds, and when it means the new Windows Phone 7+ platform.

The report shows that actual usage of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone by developers has gone down from 39% to 36% between 2010 and 2011, while Flash/Flash Lite has increased from 22% to 34%. It is rather hard to make sense of this alongside the other figures showing platform intent and abandonment intent and again it makes me wary of the report’s accuracy.

Frankly, it is hard to discern any safe bets in such a complex market, though Apple seems to be a consistent platform from a developer perspective – provide that the company does not decide to absorb the functionality of your app into iOS itself.

.net, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Gang of Four member Erich Gamma joining Microsoft’s Visual Studio team

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Microsoft’s Jason Zander has announced

that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer

Gamma is one of the “Gang of Four” who shook up software development back in 1994 with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

The other authors are Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides.

Gamma has previously been associated with Java rather than .NET. He was co-developer with Kent Beck of the JUnit unit test framework, and also worked on the Eclipse tools platform and at IBM Rational on application lifecycle management (ALM).

It is a prestigious hire and I would expect Gamma’s influence on Visual Studio to be a positive one, especially in areas like software quality, refactoring and ALM.

.net, development, internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Microsoft refuses to comment as .NET developers fret about Windows 8

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There is a long discussion over on the official Silverlight forum about Microsoft’s Windows 8 demo at D9 and what was said, and not said; and another over on Channel 9, Microsoft’s video-centric community site for developers.

At D9 Microsoft showed that Windows 8 has a dual personality. In one mode it has a touch-centric user interface which is an evolved version of what is on Windows Phone 7. In another mode, just a swipe away, it is the old Windows 7, plus whatever incremental improvements Microsoft may add. Let’s call it the Tiled mode and the Classic mode.

Pretty much everything that runs on Windows today will likely still run on Windows 8, in its Classic mode. However, the Tiled mode has a new development platform based on HTML and JavaScript, exploiting the rich features of HTML 5, and the fast JavaScript engine and hardware acceleration in the latest Internet Explorer.

Although D9 is not a developer event, Microsoft did talk specifically about this aspect. Here is the press release:

Today, we also talked a bit about how developers will build apps for the new system. Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface. There’s much more to the platform, capabilities and tools than we showed today.

Program Manager Jensen Harris says in the preview video:

We introduced a new platform based on standard web technologies

Microsoft made no mention of either Silverlight or .NET, even though Silverlight is used as the development platform in Windows Phone 7, from which Windows 8 Tiled mode draws its inspiration.

The fear of .NET developers is that Microsoft’s Windows team now regards not only Silverlight but also .NET on the client as a legacy technology. Everything will still run, but to take full advantage of Tiled mode you will need to use the new HTML and JavaScript model. Here are a couple of sample comments. This:

My biggest fears coming into Windows 8 was that, as a mostly WPF+.NET developer, was that they would shift everything to Silverlight and leave the FULL platform (can you write a Visual Studio in Silverlight? of course not, not designed for that) in the dust. To my utter shock, they did something much, much, much worse.

and this:

We are not Windows developers because we love Windows. We put up with Windows so we can use C#, F# and VS2010. I’ve considered changing the platform many times. What stops me each time is the goodness that keeps coming from devdiv. LINQ, Rx, TPL, async – these are the reasons I’m still on Windows.

Underlying the discussion is that developers have clients, and clients want applications that run on a platform with a future. Currently, Microsoft is promoting HTML and JavaScript as the future for Windows applications, putting every client-side .NET developer at a disadvantage in those pitches.

What is curious is that the developer tools division at Microsoft, part of Server and Tools, has continued to support and promote .NET; and in fact Microsoft is soon to deliver Visual Studio LightSwitch, a new edition of Visual Studio that generates only Silverlight applications. Microsoft is also using Silverlight for a number of its own web user interfaces, such as for Azure, System Center and Windows InTune, as noted here.

Now, I still expect that both Silverlight and native code, possibly with some new XAML-based tool, will be supported for Windows 8 Tiled mode. But Microsoft has not said so; and may remain silent until the Build conference in September according to .NET community manager Pete Brown:

You all saw a very small technology demo of Windows 8, and a brief press release. We’re all being quiet right now because we can’t comment on this. It’s not because we don’t care, aren’t listening, have given up, or are agreeing or disagreeing with you on something. All I can say for now is to please wait until September. If we say more before then, that will be great, but there are no promises (and I’m not aware of any plans) to say more right now. I’m very sorry that there’s nothing else to share at the moment. I know that answer is terrible, but it’s all that we can say right now. Seriously.

While this is clearly not Brown’s fault, this is poor developer communication and PR from Microsoft. The fact that .NET and Silverlight champion Scott Guthrie is moving to Windows Azure is no comfort.

The developer division, and in fact the whole of Server and Tools, has long been a bright spot at Microsoft and among its most consistent performers. The .NET story overall includes some bumps, but as a platform for business applications it has been a remarkable success. The C# language has evolved rapidly and effectively under the guidance of Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg. It would be bewildering if Microsoft were to turn its back on .NET, even if only on the client.

In fact, it is bewildering that Microsoft is being so careless with this critical part of its platform, even if this turns out to be more to do with communication than technical factors.

From the outside, it still looks as if Microsoft’s server and tools division is pulling one way, and the Windows team the other. If that is the case, it is destructive, and something CEO Steve Ballmer should address; though I imagine that Steven Sinofsky, the man who steered Windows 7 to launch so successfully, is a hard person to oppose even for the CEO.

Update: Journalist Mary Jo Foley has posted on what she “hears from my contacts” about Jupiter:

Jupiter is a user interface library for Windows and will allow developers to build immersive applications using a XAML-based approach with coming tools from Microsoft. Jupiter will allow users a choice of programming languages, namely, C#, Visual Basic and C++.

Jupiter, presuming her sources are accurate, is the managed code platform for the new Windows shell – “Tiled mode” or “Tailored Apps” or “Modern Shell – MoSH”; though if that is the case, I am not sure whether C++ in this context will compile to managed or unmanaged code. Since Silverlight is already a way to code using XAML, it is also not clear to me whether Jupiter is in effect a new Windows-only version of Silverlight, or yet another approach.

adobe, development, facebook, flash, microsoft, mobile, nokia, professional, software development, windows

Windows Phone “Mango” shown, looks good but still no Adobe Flash

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I attended the London press briefing for Windows Phone “Mango”, also known as Windows Phone 7.1. This will be on new phones in the Autumn, and will be a free update for all existing Windows Phone 7 devices.

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Microsoft showed a bunch of new features, including Internet Explorer 9 – which, we were told, is built from the same code as the PC version – improved social media integration now including Twitter and LinkedIn as well as Facebook, Hotmail, Exchange, Messenger and Gmail; and multi-tasking support.

Hold down the back key for a moment, and all running apps appear in a tiled view. Just tap the one you want.

We also saw text-to-voice and voice-to-text demos. The presented spoke the reply to a text message, though admittedly he chose to do a one-word reply, and sent it successfully.

Microsoft also announced three new OEM partners, Acer Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and ZTE Corp.

It looks good; but I did have a sense that Microsoft is ducking the hard questions. One of those concerns Adobe Flash support. At a separate developer briefing, I asked developer relations guy Brandon Watson about Adobe Flash support, observing that when Windows Phone was shown in detail pre-launch at the Mix 2009 conference in Las Vegas, it was clearly stated that Flash would be on the phone, and that Adobe was being allowed to build the Flash runtime in native code, but that it would not be included at launch.

“It does not run on the phone”, said Watson. Then he added, “It does not run on the phone.” Finally, he said, “It does not run on the phone.”

Silverlight does not run in the mobile browser either, so perhaps the problem is with mobile IE – clearly not all the code is included. Or maybe Adobe is hanging back; I asked Adobe about this at Mobile World Congress earlier this year and got an answer that was warmer but no more informative. Or maybe Microsoft is thinking, Apple does not need it, so we do not need it either.

It is a shame though, because there is a perception that Flash is one of the advantages of not going the Apple route.

On the developer side, the beta tools for Mango were released today. You can target either Windows Phone 7.0 or 7.1 with the tools, so if the beta tag does not put you off you can get going straight away. There is a ton of good stuff for developers, including the SQL Server CE local database, and the ability to mix XNA and Silverlight in a single app. We saw an app from British Airways that makes use of this to show a 3D view of an aircraft cabin when choosing a seat; I am not sure how much real value this adds but it demos nicely.

The new emulator includes accelerometer support, so you can simulate movement to test your app’s response.

There is also a profiler which shows your app’s performance in various views. Code that you wrote is highlighted in blue in the graphical view, so you can tell what you can optimise, as opposed to slow system calls that are outside your control.

The developer tools are great though, and having played with a number of mobile developer toolkits I would say that Microsoft’s is among the best and above average, though I would like to see an option for native code development. “We hear that a lot,” Watson told me.

The problem though: developers want a big market, and so far Windows Phone has not delivered it. It is almost invisible on the high street, and all the current operators and manufacturers have other phones that they are more concerned about. That will change when Nokia devices appear, but in an intensively competitive market (not forgetting HP WebOS and RIM Blackberry/QNX/PlayBook) it will not be easy for Microsoft to gain ground.

After the event I discussed this with some of the Microsoft folk. Maybe the company can better exploit the Xbox link, and sell the phone to that community. Maybe Nokia will save the day. Maybe when Microsoft comes out with a fully professional iteration of Windows Phone, tightly linked to Active Directory and group policy, and with additional developer features aimed at line of business apps, maybe then it will take off.

One positive thing I heard today was an anecdotal report that returns on Windows Phone 7 are among the lowest because users like the device so much.

The social features in Windows Phone are already good and will be better in Mango – though bear in mind that by the time Mango phones appear in the Autumn, Microsoft will likely have iPhone 5 and many tempting new Android devices to contend with.

Years ago it used to be said that Microsoft had average products (or worse) but excellent marketing. With Windows Phone, the product is good but either the marketing is lacking or the task is too great. Of course there is still time, and this industry is full of surprises, but it will take more than Mango to make Windows Phone fly.

.net, apple, development, java, javascript, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Infragistics: upbeat on Windows Phone but also building for Apple iOS, Google Android

I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO and co-founder of Infragistics, at TechEd in Atlanta earlier this week. Infragistics makes components, mainly for Windows but now beginning to support non-Windows clients. There is a set of jQuery controls in preparation, and “Our roadmaps are also going to deliver native on Android and iPhone,” Guida told me. “We have a lot of software companies that use our tools in their commercial apps, and a lot of enterprises, and we feel that we need to do it,” though he adds, “we feel that the best and the smartest business solution is to go mobile web.”

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Infragistics has a focus on data visualization, and Guida showed me some great-looking components that show animated charts, with a huge range of customisation options, and including geo-spatial and timeline controls.

I was intrigued to find Guida more upbeat about Windows Phone than most commentators, though I make allowance for the fact that his company has a component suite for the platform. “More than half of our customers told us that they’re either building or they will build for Windows Phone in the next 12 months,” he told me.

His view, which I share, is that they key advantage of Windows Phone is to Microsoft-platform enterprises rather than to consumers. “It’s so easy to extend their knowledge of Silverlight and extend apps, that they’ll be able to extend the data and the access to information this way. I think that’s going to be a beachhead for Microsoft.”

Of course Microsoft has marketed Windows Phone to consumers so far, and has told businesses they should continue to use Windows Mobile 6.5, clearly a dead-end. It may be easier when the company is able to move on from this mixed messaging and get behind Windows Phone as a business mobile platform.

Continuing a contrarian theme, Guida is also positive about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). “It’s huge, especially in the financial markets. They’ve made big bets on it. They’ve built a lot of their trading apps and a lot of their internal apps on it. We’ve been telling Microsoft this for years,” he says.

The problem I guess is that while WPF/Silverlight makes sense for data visualisation for internal apps where you control the platform, for broad reach apps that are visible to the rest of us, Adobe Flash or some other approach is a better fit.

It is understandable that companies like Infragistics are keen to talk up the Microsoft platform. Their business depends on it. It is true that Infragistics is now experimenting with other platforms like Apple iOS and Google Android, but historically developers on non-Microsoft platforms have not formed a strong component market.

“They don’t get it as much as Microsoft developers,” says Guida. “We used to have a ton of Java components. I was at the second JavaOne conference. We built some of the first AWT components, JavaBeans, Swing components. There’s a lot more pain developing for these platforms than on the Microsoft platform, Microsoft has done a great job with the tooling. Why have that pain? I think there is a distinction between the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft developer, that they have a higher tolerance for, pain’s probably not the right word, but a higher tolerance for taking longer to get stuff done. I can only believe that over time maturity will happen. It’s really about satisfying a business need or a consumer need. These platforms are different, but if we go in and give them the tools, why not? We’re really just this year starting to get there.”

It is a brave hope; but looking at the Infragistics site, there are currently no Java controls on offer, and even the 2008 NetAdvantage for JavaServer Faces (JSF) seems to have disappeared. If the Microsoft client platform does decline, the future will be challenging.

adobe, development, flash, mobile, professional, software development

Hands On with Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for Android

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I have been trying several cross-platform development tools for mobile, and today I set out to create an Adobe AIR app for Android using the new Flash Builder 4.5, available separately or as part of the Creative Suite CS5.5.

I made another calculator app, which may seem boring but gives me a chance to compare like with like.

You get started by running up Flash Builder and creating a new Flex Mobile Project.

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The disappointment here is that only Android is supported, so it is not all that cross-platform. According to Adobe’s Andrew Shorten:

An update to Flash Builder, scheduled for June 2011, will provide additional options to package Flex applications for Apple iOS and will include built-in support for packaging both Flex and ActionScript applications for BlackBerry Tablet OS.

so we have not got long to wait.

Flash Builder is based on Eclipse. The IDE is slow at times, for example when switching to visual design mode, but the platform is familiar to many developers and it feels reassuringly enterprise-ready. I find it a productive environment.

I laid out a screen with buttons and a label to display the output. The alignment tools work well although I made them a little too small as you will see shortly. Then I started writing code. The language of Flash Builder is ActionScript, which is based on JavaScript.

Here I met my first little annoyance. You can easily create a click handler for a button by right-clicking in the designer and choosing Generate Click Handler, or by clicking Generate Event Handler in the properties window. However, I thought it would be smart for most of my buttons to share the same event handler. All I need to do is to read the label of the button which was clicked, and pass it to my addnum routine that processes the input:

protected function btn_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    var theButton:Button = Button(event.currentTarget);
    addnum(theButton.label);
}

This works fine, but the IDE does not let you select an existing event handler for a button. You can paste it in, or add in in the source code editor, which is what I ended up doing. The source code editor is rather good, with excellent code completion, hover-over help for keywords, and so on.

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The second annoyance was with the label. I wanted to add a border. I selected the label but could not see a border property. I went to the full list of properties and found exotic things like dominantBaseline in the style list but still no border.

Then I found this in the reference for a label:

Borders are not supported. If you need a border, or a more complicated background, use a separate graphic element, such as a Rect, behind the Label.

I wondered if a panel would work, and started to type it in the editor:

image

Well, it looks as if Panel is overkill for simply getting a border, but it was interesting to see the editor report that “Adobe discourages using Panel when targeting profiles: mobileDevice”. I decided to do without a border for the moment.

I finished the coding and successfully ran the project in the Android simulator. Next, I attached a device and created a new Run Configuration for a device attached via USB. I plugged in my HTC Desire running Android 2.2. Provided USB debugging is enabled on the device, this works well. Not only could I run on the device; I could also set a breakpoint and debug on the device. Everything was a bit slow in debug mode but it worked.

image

Finally, I built a release version using Export Release Build on the Project menu. You have to sign the package, but there is a wizard to create a certificate for testing.

Here it is on the device – as I mentioned, the size of the buttons needs a little work:

image

So how is performance, bearing in mind that the app is trivial. Well, the good news is that performance is OK, though launch is a little slow, except for one thing that I have not figured out. Sometimes I touch a button, and see the graphic effect as the button depresses, but the input does not register. It seems most prone to this just after launching, and usually a second tap works fine.

The vsize reported for the app process by the Dalvik Debug Monitor is around 200K, similar to that for the PhoneGap version.

Overall I am impressed, though I would like to understand the button issue, and I am beginning to wonder if my year-old HTC Desire is a bit under-powered for AIR. Device performance is improving rapidly, and Flash optimization is part of the design process for mobile graphics chips, so my guess is that AIR will be more than viable as a cross-platform toolkit for mobile. You also get the benefit of all those lovely Adobe design tools.

.net, apple, cloud computing, development, microsoft, professional, software development, windows

Microsoft’s Azure toolkit for Apple iOS and Android is a start, but nothing like enough

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Microsoft ‘s Jamin Spitzer has announced toolkits for Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone, to support its Azure cloud computing platform.

I downloaded the toolkit for iOS and took a look. It is a start, but it is really only a toolkit for Azure storage, excluding SQL Azure.

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What would I hope for from an iOS toolkit for Azure? Access to SQL Server in Azure would be useful, as would a client for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). In fact, I would suggest that the WCF RIA Services which Microsoft has built for Silverlight and other .NET clients has a more useful scope than the Azure toolkit; I realise it is not exactly comparing like with like, but most applications built on Azure will be .NET applications and iOS lacks the handy .NET libraries.

A few other observations. The rich documentation for WFC RIA Services is quite a contrast to the Doxyfile docs for the iOS toolkit and its few samples, though Wade Wegner has a walkthrough. One comment asks reasonably enough why the toolkit does not use a two or three letter prefix for its classes, as Apple recommends for third-party developers, in order to avoid naming conflicts caused by Obective C’s lack of namespace support.

The development tool for Azure is Visual Studio, which does not run on a Mac. Microsoft offers a workaround: a Cloud Ready Package which is a pre-baked Azure application; you just have to amend the configuration in a text editor to point to your own storage account, so developers without Visual Studio can get started. That is all very well; but I cannot imagine that many developers will deploy Azure services on this basis.

I never know quite what to make of these little open source projects that Microsoft comes up with from time to time. It looks like a great start, but what is its long-term future? Will it be frozen if its advocate within Microsoft happens to move on?

In other words, this looks like a project, not a strategy.

The Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, developed by Soyatec and funded by Microsoft, is another example. I love the FAQ:

image

This sort of presentation says to developers: Microsoft is not serious about this, avoid.

That is a shame, because a strategy for making Azure useful across a broad range of Windows and non-Windows clients and devices is exactly what Microsoft should be working on, in order to compete effectively with other cloud platforms out there. A strategy means proper resources, a roadmap, and integration into the official Microsoft site rather than quasi-independent sites strewn over the web.

adobe, development, iphone, mobile, professional, software development

Hands On with RunRev LiveCode: rapid development for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows

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RunRev LiveCode is a cross-platform development tool for Mac, Windows, Linux, Web, Apple iOS and, from this month, Google Android.

image

It is an individualistic tool inspired by Apple’s original (but now obsolete) HyperCard and HyperTalk, in which the building blocks of your application are stacks and cards. A stack is like a window, and a card is like a panel overlaid on that window. Unlike HyperCard, LiveCode is not a virtual card stack where each card can represent a record in a database; it is simply a means of building a graphical user interface.

A key attraction of LiveCode is that it now supports the two dominant smartphone platforms. I have been looking at a number of different approaches to mobile development, most recently PhoneGap; how does LiveCode compare to the competition? In order to get some hands on experience I set out to create my simple calculator application in LiveCode.

Coming almost new to LiveCode, I found that building this application took longer than it had done in PhoneGap, which uses HTML and JavaScript. I created a new stack and dragged some buttons onto it easily enough, but found that the approach to coding took some getting used to. There are lots of tutorials, but I found the easiest way to learn was to read through chunks of the user guide [pdf], which does a better job of explaining how to code.

One annoyance is that each object, such as a button, has its own script window, which appears as a tab in the editor. Although my calculator is simple, it does have a fair number of buttons, so you end up constantly switching between tabs. If you amend some code, you have to remember to click Apply before the change takes effect. If you forget, you run the application and puzzle over why it seems to be running an old version. The environment is strongly GUI-centric; you will not like it if you are an enthusiast for Model-View-Controller architecture.

The environment is dynamic, so you can test the stack you are working on at any time simply by switching it to browse mode. This is why it is called Live Code. In this respect it is similar to the Live View in Adobe’s DreamWeaver.

image

I had to get used to writing:

put firstNumber * secondNumber into theResult

instead of

theResult = firstNumber * secondNumber

I was impressed by LiveCode’s ability to change types on the fly and to work out correctly whether you wanted to do something with a string value or a numeric value.

The language is more English-like than most languages, though I am not sure if it really easier. The language minimises use of punctuation which helps readability. Cases in switch statements fall through, C style, unless you remember to include break statements, which is traditionally a common source of bugs.

I got my calculator working on Windows. I tried building for what RunRev calls Web, but was put off by the plug-in requirement:

image 

I then moved the project to a Mac to try it on iOS. Everything still worked, but I spent some time resizing the stack and repositioning the buttons to look half-way reasonable on an iPhone. I may be missing some tricks here, but scaling and positioning controls does not seem to be a strong point for LiveCode.

LiveCode does feel that bit more at home on a Mac, reflecting its origins.

image

I was impressed with how easy it was to build the app for iOS. The way cross-platform works in LiveCode is that you open a dialog called Standalone Application Settings. There is a tab for each supported platform, in which you specify options specific to each platform. The options for iOS are extensive, including supported devices, hardware access requirements, orientation options, external libraries and so on. You can then test immediately on the simulator. For on-device testing, you use the Organizer in Xcode to copy the compiled app across.

image

The good news is that the app ran well, much better than than the PhoneGap/jQuery Mobile version, though it did not look as nice and in fairness the other app’s performance issues are likely more to do with jQuery Mobile than PhoneGap itself.

Although I found it a bit of a hassle getting started, nevertheless I was able to build a working app for Windows, Mac and iOS in a few hours, so I should not complain.

Of course there is a lot more that LiveCode can do. It has database libraries, graphical effects, an embedded web browser on some platforms, XML and text processing support, and more. It is also extensible; there is probably not much that cannot be achieved with sufficient effort.

I have not tried the Android support as my version does not include it; though I did notice that the Android options dialog is basic compared to what is available for iOS.

My first impression of LiveCode is positive, but with reservations. It looks to me like a viable and productive route to cross-platform development, or you might use it just as a quick route to app development for iOS, but I did not enjoy working in the IDE which feels quirky and unsophisticated compared to other modern IDEs. My little app works well though, and that suggests it would be worth trying it for something more advanced.

development, mobile, professional, software development, web authoring

Mobile developers follow the users; PhoneGap most popular cross-platform toolkit says survey

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Web Directions has published a State of Mobile Web Development based on input from around 1300 professional web developers. Note that this is a survey of web developers not app developers, which must skew the results if you are interested in the overall app picture, but it is still interesting.

One result deals with developer platform decisions. What are the factors that count when choosing a platform to develop for? New and minority mobile platform players will study this with interest, since getting a large number of developers on board is a high priority.

Here is the ranking of factors based on how many developers consider each one “Very important”:

  1. Number of potential users of your app: 68.55%
  2. Platform capabilities: 60.36%
  3. Ease of development: 58.55%
  4. Worldwide reach of marketplace: 40.02%
  5. Assistance in marketing your app: 23.40%

The message for the likes of Microsoft, HP and RIM is that the best way to attract developers is to sell lots of cool devices. Ease of development matters, but not as much as a large market.

Another section asks which toolkits are preferred if you are developing native apps with web technologies (note the exact question):

  1. PhoneGap 47.6%
  2. Appcelerator 26.5%
  3. Other 15.6%
  4. Adobe AIR 7.8%
  5. Apparatio 1.2%
  6. Rhomobile 1.2%

The sample here is rather small, with only 79 of the 1300 using PhoneGap, for example. I also quibble with the definitions here. Rhomobile’s Rhodes framework compiles Ruby to native code and I doubt it counts in the category “developing native apps with web technologies”. I am even sure whether AIR belongs alongside PhoneGap and Appcelerator, since AIR is Flash whereas the other two are HTML 5. Incidentally, Appcelerator is the company name and what should appear here is Titanium, which is the name of the cross-platform toolkit. Apparat.io is in private beta so its low take-up is not surprising.

Still, it is a good result for the top two. If you are interested in these toolkits don’t miss my recent interviews with André Charland at Nitobi (PhoneGap) and Jeff Haynie at Appcelerator.

adobe, development, javascript, professional, software development, web authoring

Dreamweaver CS5.5 PhoneGap apps: performance issues on Android

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This is a follow-on from my earlier post about building a simple PhoneGap app using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5. I built it on Windows targeting Android. I liked the development experience up to the point of trying the app: it looks great, but performance is terrible. That is, you tap a button and there is a perceptible pause before the app responds. It is worse in the emulator than on my HTC Desire, but still poor.

I had thought it was a configuration setting – though Dreamweaver makes it rather hard to access the build settings – but I am now wondering if jQuery mobile plus PhoneGap is just too demanding for most Android devices out there right now. Admittedly my Desire is a year or so old now. See this thread for example:

JQuery Mobile on Android is definitely slow. (Tested A2 and A3Pre on Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Desire, ZTE Blade (edit: 2.2 Froyo) – with PhoneGap, stock browser, Opera Mobile)

Something has to be done. The experience is low quality.

It is worth noting that PhoneGap is not yet a version 1.0 release – I was told it may be done by July. Further, you do not have to use jQuery Mobile with it in Dreamweaver; it just happens to provide a great set of user interface widgets. It may be better on Apple iOS; I have not tried that yet.

Nevertheless, this looks like a significant issue if you planning to dive in and deliver Android apps using the tools in the new Dreamweaver.