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Mobile Application Development

Mobile Application Development – Tips, Jobs and Skills Interview with Ted Patrcick, Barnes and Noble

by Bill Cullifer on October 10, 2011

Mobile Application Development – Tips, Jobs and Skills Interview with Ted Patrcick, Developer Evangelist Barnes and Noble

According to Barnes&Noble. the eReader ecosystem is exploding with opportunity thanks to the growing popularity of eBooks and the emergence of new types of digital content. 2010 has been deemed the year of the eReader by many, with Forrester Research, Inc. estimating explosive growth in eReader and eBook sales in the November 2010 report “eBook Buying Is About To Spiral Upward”.

In this five minute interview, I sat down with Ted Patrick, Developer Evangelist @ Barnes & Noble (formerly of Adobe fame) to learn more about the world’s largest bookseller with 40 million customers and 45,000 bookselling experts at more than 1300 retail outlets in 50 states and tips for developing Mobile Application Development resources for the Nook for practicing and aspiring Web developers and those that teach.

200,000 Appcelerator Titanium Mobile Developers Get Fast Track to Publish Apps for NOOK Color™

Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) September 12, 2011
Appcelerator®, the leading mobile cloud platform for rapidly developing native mobile, desktop, and tablet applications using open web technologies, today announced a partnership with Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Developer program to accelerate the deployment of Appcelerator Titanium™ apps on the award-winning NOOK Color Reader’s Tablet™. The partnership will give Titanium’s 200,000 mobile developers a fast track to publish apps in the NOOK Store™, available to millions of NOOK Color customers. NOOK App developers have had tremendous success selling to NOOK Color’s millions of customers, with many generating substantial revenues.

“Millions of apps have been purchased by NOOK Color customers since we launched NOOK Apps, and our customers are interested in even more,” said Claudia Romanini, Director of Developer Relations, Barnes & Noble. “Appcelerator’s proven mobile development platform and highly successful open mobile developer community are a great fit for the expansion of our NOOK Developer program. We’ll work together to bring NOOK Color customers even more rich and innovative, high-quality NOOK Apps, while developers – through our storefront – will have another strong revenue channel to monetize their apps to our large and rapidly growing audience.”

NOOK Color Reader’s Tablet™ features a stunning 7-inch VividView™ color touchscreen ideal for reading a wide variety of content including books, enhanced books, immersive children’s picture books, interactive magazines, newspapers and more. Built on Android, NOOK Color also offers the most-requested tablet features, including built-in email, an enhanced Web experience and high-quality NOOK Apps. Third-party developers have praised Barnes & Noble’s curated app model, revenue-earning potential, and the ease in which customers can find, try, buy and download apps.

Appcelerator developers will now be able to quickly deploy and offer their apps through Barnes & Noble’s expansive NOOK Store reaching millions of digital customers. Titanium developers will enjoy expedited submission of their apps for the NOOK Developer program. Titanium developers’ submissions will be automatically qualified and fast-tracked for review. Appcelerator has also updated its reference applications, documentation, and platform to easily integrate the NOOK Color SDK into Titanium Studio, Appcelerator’s enterprise-grade IDE used by over 1.5 million web developers.

Noted Scott Ellison, Vice President of Mobile & Consumer Platform, IDC Research, “The NOOK proves that there is a large market for quality, reasonably priced Android tablets that have a premium user experience tailor-made to a well-defined audience. With a focus on world-class user experience capabilities, Appcelerator Titanium will provide a solid complement to the types of applications that fit NOOK’s lifestyle focus.”

“Barnes & Noble has created a highly acclaimed offering and impressive customer base for its Android-based NOOK Color Reader’s Tablet,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “As the world’s largest cross-platform developer community, we are delighted to partner with the NOOK Developer team to help connect Appcelerator’s global developer community with Barnes & Noble’s digital storefront, driving even more downloads and traction for NOOK Color.”

Barnes & Noble will participate at Appcelerator’s CODESTRONG 2011 developers conference in San Francisco later this month. The NOOK Developer team is presenting a breakout session on developing apps for NOOK Color on September 19. The meeting will offer Titanium developers a deep dive into leveraging Titanium Studio to develop applications for NOOK Color and cover the entire development process from app creation to the app submission process. The CODESTRONG conference will bring together Titanium mobile developers from around the world for 25+ keynotes and sessions at the InterContinental Hotel San Francisco on September 18-20. For more information about attending, visit http://www.codestrong.com.

About NOOK™ from Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble’s NOOK brand of eReading products makes it easy to read what you love, anywhere you like™ with a fun, easy-to-use and immersive digital reading experience. With NOOK, customers gain access to Barnes & Noble’s expansive NOOK Bookstore™ of more than two million digital titles, and the ability to enjoy content across a wide array of popular devices. The award-winning NOOK Color™ Reader’s Tablet™, the best-value on the tablet market ($249), features a stunning 7-inch VividView™ Color Touchscreen to read all of the content you love, shop popular apps, connect via email, browse the Web and more. The NOOK Simple Touch Reader™ ($139), is the easiest-to-use 6-inch touch reader, with the longest battery life of any eReader. In Barnes & Noble stores, NOOK owners can access free Wi-Fi connectivity, enjoy the Read In Store™ feature to read NOOK Books™ for free, and the More In Store™ program, which offers free, exclusive content and special promotions. Barnes & Noble was the first company to offer digital lending for a wide selection of books through its LendMe® technology, available through NOOK eReading products. Find NOOK devices in Barnes & Noble stores and online at http://www.BN.com, as well as at Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, Books-A-Million, OfficeMax, Fred Meyer, and P.C. Richard & Son stores.

In addition to NOOK devices, Barnes & Noble makes it easy for customers to enjoy any book, anytime, anywhere with its free line of NOOK software, available at http://www.bn.com/freenookapps. Customers can use Barnes & Noble’s free eReading software to access and read books from their personal Barnes & Noble digital library on devices including iPad™, iPhone®, iPod touch®, Android™ smartphones and tablets BlackBerry®, PC and Mac®. Lifetime Library™ helps ensure that Barnes & Noble customers will always be able to access their digital libraries on NOOK products and software-enabled devices and BN.com. Barnes & Noble also offers NOOK Study™ (http://www.nookstudy.com), an innovative study platform and software solution for higher education, NOOK Kids™ (http://www.nookkids.com), a collection of digital picture and chapter books for children, and NOOK Books en español™ (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooksenespanol), the first-ever Spanish language digital bookstore in the United States.

For more information on NOOK devices and eReading software, updates, new NOOK Book releases, Free Friday™ NOOK Books and more, follow us on http://www.twitter.com/ebooksbn and http://www.facebook.com/nookbn.

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 704 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 635 college bookstores serving over 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through BN.com, one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than two million titles in its NOOK Bookstore™ (http://www.bn.com/ebooks). Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK™ eReading product offering, customers can buy and read digital books and content on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK devices, partner company products, and the most popular mobile and computing devices using free NOOK software.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

About Appcelerator

Appcelerator is the leading enterprise-grade, cross-platform development solution on the market today, with over 1.5 million developers using its software to power over 25,000 cloud-connected mobile, desktop, and web applications used by tens of millions of users every day. The company’s flagship offering, Appcelerator Titanium, is the only mobile cloud platform to enable fully native, cross-platform development, from a single codebase, at web development speed for these three platforms. Appcelerator’s customers can leverage their existing skills and open, industry standard technologies to decrease time-to-market and development costs, increase customer adoption and revenues, and enjoy greater flexibility and control. For more information, please visit http://www.appcelerator.com.

Appcelerator is a registered trademark of Appcelerator Inc. Appcelerator Titanium is a trademark of Appcelerator Inc. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

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2011 Mobile Innovators Announced

by Bill Cullifer on October 7, 2011

2011 Mobile Innovators Announced at Adobe Max 2011, LA

MobileInnovators.org announced that (7) leading Mobile Innovation organizations have been chosen as the 2011 “Mobile Innovators of the Year” for their support for the Web professional community. The award winners — a combination of software, hardware and technology companies were recognized by panel of industry professionals during the annual Adobe Max 2011 conference that took place October 2-4, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA.

Adobe MAX brings together top designers, developers and business minds in the industry to celebrate, explore and shape the future of digital experiences and stay at the forefront of the multi screen revolution. “Developing Web applications provides countless opportunities for Web professionals to monetize their work, a key mission for the association of Web professionals and we are pleased to recognize these Mobile Innovator Rock Stars” said, Bill Cullifer, Executive Director Webprofessionals.org and the MobileInnovators.org education initiative.

The 2011 “Mobile Innovators” at the Adobe MAX event were chosen by a committee comprised of representatives from publishing, Web design professional training, mobile application development, academia and not for profit professional association Webprofessionals.org.

The 2011 Mobile Innovators of the Year are:

* Adobe System Inc. for the acquisition of PhoneGap

* Barnes&Noble for their support for Mobile App Developers

* Sony for their $200,000 Mobile App Challenge

* Motorola for their support for Mobile App Developers

* LGAppsTV for their support for Mobile App Developers

* JamPot Technologies Ltd for their support for Mobile App Developers

* BlackBerry for their support for Mobile App Developers

Mobile Innovation, Cell phone and wireless laptop internet use have each grown more prevalent over the last year. According to Pew Research Center, nearly half of all adults (47%) go online with a laptop using a Wi-Fi connection or mobile broadband card (up from the 39% who did so as of April 2009) while 40% of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009). This means that 59% of adults now access the internet wirelessly using a laptop or portable device.

Selection Committee

* Bret Peters, Partner/Vice President Fig Leaf Software

* Gary-Paul Prince, Artist and Marketing Manager Peachpit / Pearson Education

* Janine Warner, Author, Trainer and Web Designer DigitalFamily.com

* Mark DuBois, Professor Web Systems Program Manager Illinois Central College & Director of Education WebProfessionals.org

* Orralyn Vithyavuthi, Designer GrDesignoor.com

About WebProfessionals.org

WebProfessionals.org is a non-profit professional association dedicated to the support of individuals and organizations who create, manage or market web sites. WOW provides education as well as certification, technical, employment and member advantage services to thousands of aspiring and practicing web professionals and those that teach Web professional topics worldwide. http://webprofessionals.org .

About MobileInnovators.org

MobileInnovators.org is an online resource for Mobile Innovators and Mobile Application Developers providing daily news, podcast, interviews and hundreds of training videos for aspiring and practicing Mobile Applications Developers and those that teach. http://mobileinnovators.org

About Adobe MAX

Adobe MAX is a unique opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, and business leaders as we shape the future of digital media together.

Discover how to realize the full potential of your content and applications. Find new opportunities presented by rich experiences across screens. Explore new methods for monetizing content. Learn about innovative technologies that enable designers and developers to work together more effectively

 

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Mobile Application Development – Current Status, Opportunites and Skills Required

by Bill Cullifer on February 3, 2011

Mobile Application Development – Current Status, Opportunites and Skills Required Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mobile Application Development – Current Status, Opportunities and Skills Required – Interview with Professor Mark DuBois

Today’s Web Professional Minute is an interview with Professor Mark DuBois, Illinois Central College and WOW’s Director of Education. In this seven minute podcast, Mark covers the current status of Mobile Application Development, his research into the landscape of providers and devices, the opportunities for monetization, jobs and the skills required and the training resources available.

According to Wikipedia, Mobile application development is the process by which applications are developed for small low-power hand held devices such as personal digital assistants, enterprise digital assistants or mobile phones. These applications are either pre-installed on phones during manufacture, or downloaded by customers from app stores and other mobile software distribution platforms.

Mobile software development is the process of creating software which can be used on a mobile device. It also refers to the creation of special web and applications for mobile devices. This is often done using a mobile simulator on a personal computer.

Mobile software is developed by using different platforms and programming languages based on the target mobile device. There are many different hardware components found in mobile devices so their applications are developed using different software architectures. It is also made more difficult because users of mobile applications have diverse preferences so extensive improvements to traditional system development methodologies are required in order to keep up with this demand.

Most of the methodologies in use are based on the model-driven approach which has three different views of the application development process: the application itself and its structure, the business logic and (3) the graphical user interface of the application.
[edit] Platforms for multi-vendor devices

The following software platforms will run on hardware platforms from a number of different manufacturers:

* Java ME This platform generally produces portable applications, although sometimes device-specific libraries exist (commonly used for games), making them non-portable. It is often used to provide simple applications on feature phones. Applications (including their data) cannot be larger than around 1 MB if they are to run on most phones. They must also be cryptographically signed in order to use APIs such as the file system access API. This is relatively expensive and is rarely done, even for commercial applications. Java ME runs atop a Virtual Machine (called the KVM) which allows reasonable, but not complete, access to the functionality of the underlying phone. The JSR process serves to incrementally increase the functionality that can be made available to Java ME, while also providing Carriers and OEMs the ability to prevent access, or limit access to provisioned software.
* Symbian platform Designed from the start for mobile devices, the Symbian platform is a real time, multi-tasking OS specifically architected to run well on resource-constrained systems, maximising performance and battery life whilst minimising memory usage. The Symbian Foundation maintains the code for the open source software platform based on Symbian OS and software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, and Sony Ericsson, including the S60 and MOAP(S) user interfaces. The platform is fully open source, mostly supplied under the Eclipse Public License. Over 300 million Symbian OS-based units have been shipped and Symbian holds more than a 50% market share globally.
* Android Android is a Linux-based platform from the Open Handset Alliance, whose 34 members include Google, HTC, Motorola, Qualcomm, and T-Mobile. It is supported by over 34 major software, hardware and telecoms companies. The Linux kernel is used as a hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Application programming is primarily done in Java. The Android specific Java SDK is required for development although any Java IDE may be used. Performance critical code can be written in C, C++ or other native code languages using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK).
* Windows Mobile is a variant of Windows CE for mobile phones. Windows CE was originally developed for palmtop computers and Pocket PC PDAs with stylus-touch screens, and later adapted for use with keyboard-equipped smartphones. Phones have become the largest installed base for CE, though market share has fallen since the introduction of Android and IPhone. Windows Mobile supports a subset of the win32 programming interface, and a simplified GUI with one window on the screen at a time. Applications can use the .NET Compact Framework Devices are compatible with applications on Pocket PC/Windows Mobile devices. Windows Mobile 6.5 introduced IPhone-like finger-based touch interfaces, while Windows Phone 7 is a substantial redesign that uses Silverlight and XNA for rich user interfaces.
* Qt (framework) Qt uses standard C++ but makes extensive use of a special pre-processor (called the Meta Object Compiler, or moc) to enrich the language. Qt can also be used in several other programming languages via language bindings. It runs on all major platforms and has extensive internationalization support. Non-GUI features include SQL database access, XML parsing, thread management, network support, and a unified cross-platform API for file handling.
* BREW Used for deploying applications on CDMA devices (but also supports GPRS/GSM models). Distributed via a Brew Content Platform. Little penetration in Europe. BREW can provide complete control of the handset and access to all its functionality. However the power provided by native code with direct access to the handset APIs, has caused the BREW development process to be tailored largely towards recognized software vendors. While the BREW SDK (Software Development Kit) is freely available, running software on real mobile hardware (as opposed to the provided emulator) requires a digital signature which can only be generated with tools issued by a handful of parties, namely mobile content providers and Qualcomm themselves. Even then, the software will only work on test enabled devices. To be downloadable on regular phones the software must be checked, tested and given approval by Qualcomm via their TRUE BREW Testing program.
* Palm OS formerly had a strong enterprise following in the important US market, based on Palm PDAs
o Palm webOS is Palm’s follow-on proprietary mobile operating system running on a Linux kernel which supports multitasking. Launched with Palm Pre and Pixi, now owned by Hewlett Packard.
* Flash Lite Used for devices that support the Flash Lite player.
* Microbrowser based. Lightweight functionality provided via a web-interface

Platforms for single vendor devices

The following software platforms will only run on a hardware platforms from a specific manufacturer:

* BlackBerry Supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services as well as a multi-touch interface. It has a built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for “thumbing”, the use of only the thumbs to type. The BlackBerry devices soon took a dominating position on the North American smartphone market. Also important for BlackBerry are the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) and the Mobile Data System (BlackBerry MDS).
* iOS (Apple) The iPhone and iPod Touch SDK uses Objective-C, based on the C programming language. Currently, is only available on Mac OS X 10.5+ and is the only way to write an iPhone application. All applications must be cleared by Apple before being hosted on the AppStore, the sole distribution channel for iPhone and iPod touch applications. However, non-Apple approved applications can be released to jailbroken iPhones via Cydia or Installer. This system is also used for the iPad tablet computer.

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