Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Mobile (Hybrid) Apps Introduction

Been to several events that talk about mobile development recently.  Looks like the "web mobile apps" is the way to go in the future.  And the technology using here is quite simple and standardized - html5, css3 and javascript.  With the new HTML5, it provides lots of features like canvas, videos, geo-location, local storage ... etc, it makes developing a persistent web apps for mobile phone become highly doable.  And the techniques of developing web apps in mobile is not much difference than doing that in the browser, the only difference is the API (and device) you can access. Well, of course, doing web apps in the mobile has its limitation too, for example, performance is an issues.

However, there is a concept of Hybrid App, which converting your web apps into a native app for your mobile.  So in this way, you are still using html5, css and javascript (yep, you don't need to learn Objective-C ... etc) and yet your app will end up be compiled as native app and can access your phone features / devices.  And it solved the problems that a pure web mobile apps had. PhoneGap is one of the leaders in this field.

There are several links I found useful  for mobile web development, let me share it here

http://tinysrc.net/   - a free service convert your image into appropriate size on the fly
http://caniuse.com  - can you use certain feature in html5, css on a various platform

http://blitz.io/ - load testing for mobile
http://origwww.blaze.io/mobile/ - test your website performance in mobile devices
http://www.webpagetest.org/  - similar to above
http://punypng.com/ - a free web service to downsize your image without trading off quality

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