Author Archives: Manuel Gomes

About Manuel Gomes

God created the world in 7 days. Kept it in Beta 'til 1975.

First Google+ APIs released: read-only people and activitites

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Chris Chabot announced the new Google+ APIs:

I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.

The APIs are available at Google+ Platform Developers site, and an introductory article is also available at the Google+ Platform Blog.

Wunderlist for Android is going native, drops Appcelerator Titanium Mobile

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Appcelerator’s approach to the Android platform has made another victim, a significant one: 6Wunderkinder’s popular Wunderlist ditched Titanium Mobile (TM) for Android, and is now a native app.

“(…) Wunderlist is now native – smaller, faster and more stable.”
Matthew Bostock, 6Wunderkinder’s blog

Translated, Wunderlist got rid of TM’s biggest problems:

  • Size: even the smallest “Hello World” app weights at least 1.5MB (this is still huge in the mobile world – do the same thing using native Java and the app will only weight a few KB);
  • Speed: TM for Android slow. This is mainly due to the fact that TM for Android is using Mozilla’s Rhino as its javascript interpreter, written in Java, running inside Dalvik’s VM, and not compiled to native ARM, as google’s V8, SpiderMonkey or any JS engine written in C or C++ would;
  • Stability: this one is not really, in my opinion, TM’s fault. Due to the fact that Javascript is dynamic language, and Titanium does not compile or even do any proper syntax check, the quality of the code is probably to blame here.

Appcelerator reacted two days after 6Wunderkinder’s announcement, stating that Titanium Mobile for Android will use, somewhere in the future, google’s V8 engine. This comes, however, with a still significant drawback: only devices running Android 2.2 or newer support android’s NDK, and therefore the natively compiled V8 Engine. According to Appcelerator’s own benchmarks, this will at least double the performance. Remains to be seen if the “Size” problem will be solved: V8′s binaries will still be inside the app’s package…

Jonathan Stark, blogger and writer of various books (Building Android Apps with HTML(…), Building iPhone Apps (…) without Objective-C among others), compares various approaches to Mobile Enterprise development: Native Apps, Web Apps and Hybrid Apps (PhoneGap, Titanium et al.):

(…) As the mobile enterprise continues to boom and hardware complexity grows with a wide range of platforms, devices and audiences, there is no doubt that HTML5 will skyrocket in adoption. HTML5 Web-based apps offer the developer a “write one, run many” solution, addressing the many demands of today’s immediacy for remote communication, along with enhanced modern media capabilities that have become of increasing importance to both business and consumer.

Complete article on WirelessWeek.com.

Now that WebOS died, which is the best development crossplatform for iOS, Android, RIM and WP7?

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Yes, the excellent WebOS is defunct, and it will never be the mainstream player as, at least technically, it deserved. For all of us developing for the mobile world that don’t have the time or budget to develop natively in all the mainstream platforms, its one less player to target. Myself, personally, am deciding/evaluating available options for true cross-platform development targeting iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

My requirements are:

  • Native UI components must be used – maintaining the native look and feel for each platform is important (PhoneGap is out of the picture because of this);
  • The same code base (or at least most of it) must be used in all platforms;
  • The UI must scale well between Phone and Tablet formats and screen densities (DPI);
  • The application must perform smoothly, speedwise, even in lower end devices;
  • Some access to the device’s hardware: GPS, sensors, camera.

I have found some platforms so far:

  • Titanium Mobile: this is my current number one, but i don’t think Windows Phone 7 will be supported. Plus, the Android implementation is a bit clumsy: the JavaScript core is not interpreted by the OS, so a java JS interpreter is included- this makes the application big and slow. In iOS this problem does not exist, as the system’s javascript interpreter is used. On the plus side, native UI components are supported and a very nice, Eclipse based, IDE is provided;
  • PhoneGap: this one also uses JavaScript, but is completely HTML/JS based: the application runs inside a WebView, and has no bindings to native UI components, it relies on third-party JS libraries to build the UI, such as Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. It’s a browser on steroids basically, and doesn’t float my boat.
  • RhoMobile: haven’t tested or reviewed this one yet, opinions anyone?

So, i need your opinion about these or other development tools: are they any good? Have you used them in a project? Comment below.

palmWorkingFinally

WebOS Emulator error E_ACCESSDENIED (0×80070005), The solution

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I am currently evaluating development frameworks and mobile platforms for my company, so we can choose our path in our next multi-platform mobile applications (to develop specific apps for each platform is just too expensive). This took me to WebOS, clearly a small player, but with HP at the wheel, maybe it will get somewhere. So, lets look at it: install the SDK, start the emulator and…

… something went wrong: was trying to start Palm WebOS Emulator, version 2.1, and this error always popped up:

The object functionality is limited
code E_ACCESSDENIED (0×80070005), component Machine, interface IMachine, callee IUnknown

and I’ve found the solution!

Continue reading →

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