Light Castle: 2011

Image by ecerverab via Flickr

For the last year or so I have become a bit fascinated by the myriad of tools available for building mobile apps. Particularly tools using the very promising HTML5/javascript/CSS3 combination with access to native functionality like accelerometer and camera built in. All part of my grand mobile dream of write once, run anywhere with near native access to phone functionality.

I have built projects and experiments using many of these tools, Rhodes, Titanium, phonegap, GameSalad, to name a few. Yet I was stunned that none of those fit the bill for this latest project which a friend and I have been kicking around for months now; an in-the-wild personal foreign language digital assistant designed specifically for the traveler who is intrigued by the local ladies but not so well versed in the local language!!! Great idea right?? You bet your ass it is. :) That is why selection of the proper toolkit is crucial to its success.

Our Requirements in brief:

App compiled to Binary code
Fast
In-App purchase Enabled
iAdd style adverts Enabled
Sexy interface that works well on, at least, iphone and Android

I have used rhomobile before. I deployed to the android store an app promoting chalkboard, a geospecific advertising service built by some friends in Singapore. While I found that it had a rich enough feature set to do the job; and I actually like writing ruby code in a rails-like environment, I found the following drawbacks:

The UI was less than attractive, downright boring even. In fact the most visually interesting bit of my app, the twitter client, ended up finally being written in javascript and took about 1/10th as long as figuring out how to code up the same thing in Ruby and Rhodes.
The load time was horrendously slow. Even after I performed every code optimization trick I could find on forums and videos I still found load times to be about 2-2.5 times slower than
Their developer model has changed. I must admit it is a bit confusing and I have not quite figured out if I have to pay more money or not.
It lacked the hooks for iADS and In-App PURCHASE. Deal-breaker for us more capitalist developers.
The service did not offer the lightning fast remote end-around-apple-approval-process updates which are a major selling point of javascript and HTML5 based dev tools. Bad.

Thus I moved on to titanium. But alas even though it did fare much better on points one and 2; I didn't have the confusion about where I stood as a developer (pt 3); its plans to address points 4 and 5 are not yet realized. Points 4 & 5 also put the freeze on any aspirations I had to use the open source utility phonegap.

Enter Appmobi, html5 and javascript, compiles into a native binary that is fully equipped with in-App purchase and iAd style advertising. We here at the Lab were overjoyed, and proceeded to put it through it's paces!!!

To be continued. . .

Chris Cotton

Applications Developer for Mobile and Web