You’ve made an app for Android, iOS, Windows – what about the user interface?
Cross-platform development is a big deal, and will continue to be so until a day comes when everyone uses the same platform. Android? HTML? WebKit? iOS? Windows?
Maybe one day, but for now the world is multi-platform, and unless you can afford to ignore all platforms but one, or to develop independent projects for each platform, some kind of cross-platform approach makes sense, especially in mobile.
Sometimes I hear it said that there are essentially two approaches to cross-platform mobile apps. You can either use an embedded browser control and write a web app wrapped as a native app, as in Adobe PhoneGap/Cordova or the similar approach taken by Sencha, or you can use a cross-platform tool that creates native apps, such as Xamarin Studio, Appcelerator Titanium, or Embarcardero FireMonkey. Read more...
RIM begs devs: Build for BlackBerry 10, we’ll bung you $10K
Developers who get BlackBerry 10 apps in quick will get their income bumped up to $10,000 if they make more than $1,000, as RIM gets in the drinks at the last chance salon.
The "10K Developer Commitment" kicks in this autumn, and applies to applications submitted before BlackBerry World which will be early next year. Applications will have to generate more than $1K in revenue, including in-app purchases, but if they make less than $10K then RIM will make up the difference.
Chinese Web giant Sina’s new citizen reporting platform pulled amid rumor of government interference
We’ve seen plenty of efforts aimed at creating citizen news channels — the last few days alone saw Dabble and Signal launch — but Chinese Web giant Sina‘s effort to join the grouping cluster of news-gathering services has been the most curious yet.
Earlier today Sina, which runs popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo, launched Baoliao, a real-time news reporting platform. However, there’s a problem. As Tech in Asia points out, Baoliao is nowhere to be found.
The Chinese government has been hot on cracking down on anonymous Internet users and the reporting of ‘harmful information’, could it be that the state stepped in to bring down the service just hours after it launched? Read more...
Former Googlers Launch YC-Backed Dealupa: A PageRank For Daily Deals
If you were to stop for a moment and consider what your perfect deals site would be, chances are it doesn’t look a whole lot like any of the big names currently operating in the space. When it comes down to it, we all have our own individual preferences when it comes to products, activities, and experiences. So, the lowest common denominator would be a platform that routinely serves us great deals on the things we actually enjoy. As simple as that may sound, there are few deals players that do it well. Dealupa, a startup that’s part of Y Combinator’s current winter batch, is launching today with what it hopes is a solution to deal disappointment, aka deal fatigue. Read more...
Pentaho open sources ‘big data’ integration tools under Apache 2.0
BI vendor Pentaho is open sourcing a number of tools related to big data in the 4.3 release of its Kettle data-integration platform and has moved the project overall to the Apache 2.0 license, the company announced Monday.
While Kettle had always been available in a community edition at no charge, the tools being open sourced were previously only available in the company's commercialized edition. They include integrations for Hadoop's file system and MapReduce as well as connectors to NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.
Those technologies are some of the most popular tools associated with the analysis of "big data," an industry buzzword referring to the ever-larger amounts of unstructured information being generated by websites, sensors, and other sources, along with transactional data from enterprise applications. Read more...
HP’s open-sourcing of webOS begins today
The last time we heard about webOS, HP had opted to open-source the mobile platform, letting developers take a stab at breathing some life into it. It was an unconventional move, but not necessarily a bad one: it puts the platform largely in the hands of the development community, and it doesn’t require a large investment.
Today we found out more about HP’s plans for the second coming of webOS. The first step of the open sourcing process, the release of the Enyo application framework, took place today. The entire process is expected to be completed by September of this year. Upon completion of the open-sourcing transition, it will be known as Open webOS 1.0. Read more...
‘Server huggers’ present obstacle to cloud adoption
Chipita America may be as close to a server-less company as one can find. Its ERP systems, EDI, BI, Office, Exchange and file servers are all hosted in a service provider's cloud.
About six years ago, when many IT managers were debating Nicholas Carr's book "Does IT Matter," Chipita CIO Scott Martin was moving the Tulsa, Okla.-based snack food maker's email to a third party's cloud hosted platform. Since then Chipita has moved the rest its core systems to the cloud.
Martin said he didn't see a competitive advantage in managing internal systems, believing that his time could be best spent focusing on business needs.
"The real difference that IT leaders [can make] is being able to leverage information to create competitive advantage in the marketplace," said Martin. Read more...
Samsung’s iOS rival gets multitasking and HTML5
Samsung has launched the next version of its own mobile platform Bada, bringing multitasking, HTML5 and a new advertising engine to Bada developers.
Bada developers can now download the SDK and start getting used to the new, scalable UI elements, push notifications, and the aforementioned multitasking and in-app adverts, but they'll have to wait for handsets before they'll be able to sell any of their enhanced v2 apps.
Samsung's Bada has been a simmering success for the company – Canalys reckons Samsung has shipped 4.5 million Bada handsets since launch, while Samsung claims to have seen more than 100 million downloads of the 40,000 applications in its application store (though Samsung's store also contains apps for its Android handsets). Read more...
Apple Talk: Can Google become the new Apple?
Much has been written about the Google-Motorola deal. About how it adds 60 per cent to Google's headcount. Much has been written about what it means for Android's platform partners such as HTC and Samsung, and even more has been said about Google's access to Motorola's vast, though not exhaustive, library of patents.
The argument for the Google-Motorola deal that interests me in the context of Apple is the idea that Google wants to use the deal to become an integrated supplier of hardware and software. Just like Apple.
It would be an admission that the Apple way is the right way. Ideological arguments aside, the balance sheet would seem to agree.
Google is a software company, pure and simple. It's a brilliant software company that has developed an incredibly successful product that makes it a huge amount of money. But it is just a software company. Or at least it was at the start of the week. Read more...
Digia opens Qt office in the U.S.
Finnish company Digia has opened an office in the U.S. in an effort to boost the commercial usage of a cross-platform application and user interface framework Qt, it said on Tuesday.
In March, Digia announced it was acquiring Nokia's Qt Commercial licensing and services business. Nokia kept control of the software itself.
Qt is designed to let developers write and deploy applications across desktop, mobile, and embedded OSes without rewriting the source code. It is available either as open source or under a commercial license. Companies that want to use the latter for its embedded and desktop systems can now turn to Digia. Read more...
Google Wallet may be missing key partners
While Google had some notable partners at the launch of its mobile payment platform, the companies that weren't there could end up determining the success of the project.
Google on Thursday announced a platform and a trial that will let people tap their NFC-capable phones against a reader in a retail store to pay for goods.
Sprint, Mastercard, Citi and First Data are supporting field trials in New York and San Francisco. More than 120,000 retail outlets including Macy's, Bloomingdales, Subway, Walgreens and others are involved. Read more...
Android smartphones winning over ‘app’ makers
Google is the new darling of software wizards out to cash-in on the world's love for customizing smartphones with fun, hip or functional applications.
Developers once obsessed with "apps" for Apple's hot-selling iPhones are touting creations tailored for smartphones built on the Google-backed Android platform.
"In the past seven months, Android has become the de facto second platform out there that people are developing for," AppNation chairman Drew Ianni told AFP during the gathering of software entrepreneurs this week in San Francisco. Read more...