Cross-platform Mobile Deployment
photo credit: Capture Queen ™I have a side project for iPhone that I'm working on. There's a patent filing in process, incorporation paperwork to do, all that good stuff - so I won't be doing a lot of specifics about the project until it's ready to go. It's basically a location-based-services thing but when we've looked over what everyone seems to be doing with LBS and social networking and the like, it all seems to be thinking very inside the box. Just like a few years ago there was a rash of "... on the internet!" patents where things we'd done forever in the wetworld were being done online and called "visionary", now there's a rash of similar "... on a mobile phone!" patents and websites that are no more groundbreaking than when we did them online or on our feet. It's like patenting driving in nails with the side of a hammer. It works, but it's not especially groundbreaking nor is it even ideal.
We really feel that this project is going to move mountains though, and change the way people view the real world around them, not just when they're in front of a computer.
The tendency towards developing for the iPhone is that the iPhone has arguably the best SDK there is: and a substantial and rapidly growing marketshare. Still, though, that limits our deployment: it's the largest selling smartphone-style device, but it doesn't represent the majority of the market. No-one does.
Today I've been evaluating Mojax, a cross-platform mobile development environment. It looks promising. It promises cross-platform compatibility, including access to a number of necessary core services like GPS, and currently runs on all phones supporting J2ME (Java on Mobile), all color Blackberry phones, and shortly Windows Mobile devices from WinMo 2003 onward, any mobile running Brew V2 or later, and Helio devices. Just the J2ME support gets me onto most smartphones - so this effectively would get the product onto every mobile device there is with gps capability.
This excites me because I like the prospect of running the application on every feature-capable mobile phone without having to separately develop for Blackberry, HTC, Samsung, and Nokia. Getting the product out simultaneously for iPhone, Windows Mobile, PalmOS and Blackberry would be fantastic. There are some annoyances with using J2ME midlets, but I'll take the slight user experience tradeoff for being able to deliver an application at all without breaking the bank
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June 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Have you evaluated anything else but Mojax? what are the alternatives to this? I have been waiting for winmo support for 1+ year on mojax but nothing yet.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I know their development cycle is somewhat slow - and “coming soon” is always a little bit of a warning sign for me. I can put “Coming soon: Time machines!” on my webpage, but delivering is a whole different story.
I haven’t looked into any other cross-platform development systems yet, mainly because I haven’t seen anything else that seems as promising. If it’s a case of having to separately develop for a variety of different phones, then I’ll just have to wait and do Java midlets for everything until I can devote time and/or budget to doing native applications.
Have you seen anything else that looks good? For obvious reasons, I’m really intending to avoid spending a lot of time cross-developing right now: I’ll do iPhone and *something* else - hopefully that something is more than one platform.
June 16th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
DAMN IT!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Winston
June 19th, 2008 at 12:41 am
The problem I see with developing for the much larger crowd using Java is A) you have to use java, and B) the majority of the larger crowd don’t download apps for their phone.
It’s one of the same reasons why cell phone games haven’t taken off in America like they have in other countries where people are used to downloading things on their phone, and using their phone for everything. Not to mention their lower end phones are generally much nicer than our lower-end phones.
Even when I had a nice Sony Ericsson, the only thing I ever downloaded on it was GMail, and I barely even used it.
I can see it more taking off in the smartphone market, but like with most products, developing native is always better. Java is such a turd I hate it I hate it I hate it.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Well the project is definitely a download-to-phone sort of thing - and because of what it does, there’s no reason to have it on a non-smartphone. Browser-based just isn’t going to work for this unless phone browsers become much more sophisticated (and are able to tie into aspects of the phone’s hardware that no browser really *ought* to be able to access for security reasons)
I think the winds are changing there: the iPhone introduced “smartphone” devices to a much broader market and I think we’ll see that the internet as we know it ceases to be the sit-and-type and read and watch YouTube thing that it is today. The internet is a way of communicating information, and information has always been a lot more than newspapers, textbooks and television.
As phones come to know where they are and are able to tie into a variety of realtime data sources, a lot can happen that the vast majority of people aren’t even beginning to see yet. The mobile web won’t greatly resemble the desktop one: and browsers won’t be the best interface for it until they make some changes.
In the meantime, it’s gotta be applications.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
I agree with most of what you said!
But doesn’t mobilesafari have hooks into the API to allow you to use corelocation and things like that? I bet if this is truly signaling a change, things of that nature will start to be built into other phones. I know you can’t count on that right now (and it would be silly to develop for something that may happen in the future as I’m sure you’re well aware of) but I think it could actually be game changing.
And again, I’m surprised you’re not already on twitter, haha.