Category: Mobile

A Cloud Service To Build HTML5 And Native Mobile Apps

This article originally appeared on TheServerSide.com: http://www.theserverside.com/opinion/A-cloud-service-to-build-mobile-apps.

I’m sure you’ve heard about platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or cloud-based services like Google Apps Engine, CloudBees, Heruko, Engine Yard, and Cloud Foundry. All are excellent platforms that ease the process of managing, maintaining, and administering the platform on which an application you develop runs. Most tend to be focused on the hosting and managing side of the finished application. But what about a cloud-based service that enables you to build an app, and specifically a mobile app? Well, such a service already exists. The cloud-based service is called Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder.

What is Tiggr?

Tiggr is a cloud-based mobile app builder. It enables you to build both mobile Web and native apps. To get a native app, Tiggr uses the PhoneGap library. The beauty in Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder is that there is nothing to download, nothing to install, and nothing to configure or set up. Creating a new mobile app in Tiggr takes relatively little time compared to traditional methods. Tiggr saves developers time when configuring projects with various libraries.

Building a Mobile UI with jQuery Mobile

Tiggr uses jQuery Mobile components – cross-platform and cross-device mobile components. As you can see from the screen shot, the mobile palette on the left holds all the components and you simply drag and drop them into the phone.

You can rearrange components or set properties. A powerful Grid component is available to simplify building apps with complex layouts. An app can have any number of screens, of course.

Adding HTML events and actions

In Tiggr, you build real mobile apps. To make it possible to build real mobile apps we need to be able to define HTML events such as click and value change and then add an action to be invoked for the event. The action can be navigating to another screen, opening a pop-up, setting a JavaScript variable, or invoking a custom JavaScript.
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RichFaces 4.1 M3 – New Components, Mobile Support, and Better Performance

The RichFaces team has been doing an amazing job on RichFaces 4.1 and today released Milestone 3. Many components in 4.1 have been optimized for mobile. You can see the Milestone 3 components showcase deployed to OpenShift – Red Hat’s PaaS. It uses device detection and will show the mobile optimized version if you access from a mobile device.

Staying on mobile topic, if you want to build HTML5 and native mobile apps using cloud services, try Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder.

New components

In the showcase, you will find a number of new components:

rich:editor, rich:orderingList, and rich:pickList are components from RichFaces 3.3 that didn’t make into 4.0, so this very good. The new component is rich:notifyMesssage. It’s a very cool component, it allows showing messages in a floating box. Try it.

Better performance

With mobile support, resource handling has been improved. The goal is to reduce the number of requests as well as reduce the size of JavaScript, and CSS sent to the browser. Performance improvements will not limited to mobile, but will also give a standard Web app a boost in performance.

You can read more what’s new in RichFaces 4.1 M3 from Brian Leathem: http://blog.bleathem.ca/2011/10/richfaces-410m3-release-announcement.html

Learn How To Build Android Apps Using Cloud Service At AnDevCon II, Nov 6-9

Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder (Exadel) is going to be at AnDevCon II in San Francisco Bay Area, November 6-9. Stop by our booth and learn how to build Android apps ready for the Android Market using cloud services, all in about 5 minutes. It’s really awesome, I promise. To get a peek, watch this video:

You Can Build A Mobile App Today—Yes, We Mean You

Do you need to be a developer to build a mobile app today? The answer is no.

The app market is booming. It doesn’t matter if you have Apple’s iPhone or iPad or an Android device. Hundreds of thousands of apps are out there for your favorite mobile gadget, with more being added each day. But if you don’t have any developer skills, do you have any hope of joining the feeding frenzy? Sure, if the evolution of the Web is any indication.

In the mid-1990s, when the Web was still in it infancy, building a Web site for your school, small business, or just for fun wasn’t simple. It required strong IT skills. You first had to know HTML, the language with which you build the pages. You also needed to know how to upload the pages to the server (or first find the server). Connecting to the server and uploading the files was usually done via FTP, which wasn’t very simple either.

You needed to know a lot of other things too, such as where to upload images, where to upload other pages, and how to make the pages public—and we aren’t even talking about adding basic dynamic or dynamic features to the site. Anyone who wanted to get a basic Web site up and running but didn’t have a strong IT background was out of luck unless they paid someone to do it.

Build-Your-Own Web Sites

Things started to get simpler in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Build-your-own Web site services such as GeoCities (acquired by Yahoo in 1999, discontinued in 2007, only available in Japan today) made it much simpler to build and publish basic Web sites.

These services provided browser-based tools for building simple Web sites. Students, teachers, small business owners, and just about anyone else could create a Web site without needing to know much about Web development. GeoCities wasn’t the only service either. Homestead, Tripod, and FortuneCity were available at the time too.

Blogs And Social Media

With every year, it has become simpler and simpler to create Web pages or a Web presence for those without traditional IT or Web development experience. In 2003, the WordPress blogging platform was released. It enabled anyone with just a few clicks to create a blog or a Web site, no IT skills required.

Publishing content was made super easy. Today, the WordPress blog can be extended, customized, and made very dynamic with thousands of free available plug-ins. Look-and-feel can easily be changed with thousands of available free themes.

Next, we saw the rise of the MySpace social network. MySpace made it very simple to create your own space on the Web by easily adding blogs, pictures, and videos to the site. Today, Facebook dominates the social Web as anyone can create a page and enhance it with thousands of available apps.

Can The Same Happen With Mobile Apps?

The mobile ecosystem is huge, and it’s only going to get bigger. Many insiders believe that in only one or two years, more people will access the Internet from their mobile devices like phones and tablets than from desktop computers. Most observers will also agree that what’s happening with mobile is very similar to what happened with the Web.

The one big difference is the speed with which it is happening. The mobile ecosystem is growing at a much faster rate. One reason is that people always carry their mobile devices with them. Let’s assume that the mobile apps era started in 2007, with the first iPhone release. It took only four years to get where we are today with mobile. That’s incredibly fast.

Everyone wanted to have a Web site 10 years ago. Today, everyone wants to have a mobile app. It’s no wonder they say history repeats itself. So, we’re facing similar challenges to what we faced in the early Web days.

How can someone without mobile development skills build and publish a mobile app? You can always hire someone to build the app for you. However, people with mobile development skills are difficult to find and very expensive.

As cloud services such as WordPress made it very easy to publish on the Web, a new cloud service exists that makes it very easy for “citizen developers” to build mobile apps. Tiggr Mobile Apps Buider (http://gotiggr.com) makes it very easy for anyone to build mobile Web and native apps, entirely in the cloud.

You needed a Web developer guru to create any Web presence 15 years ago. Today, it’s possible to create a Web presence with advanced features in just a few clicks and under five minutes.

Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder

Tiggr is a super easy cloud service for building mobile apps. The key is making the process very easy and very fast. Anyone can use Tiggr to build a mobile app (see the figure). No mobile development or programming skills are required. It takes just five easy steps to build a mobile app with Tiggr:

1. Build the mobile user interface (UI): To build the mobile UI, you simply drag and drop components into the phone screen.

2. Add Internet content: Adding data and content to your app is very simple. You can get data from popular representational state transfer (REST) services such as Twitter, Facebook, or anything else available on the Internet.

3. Make the app interactive: Need something to happen when a button is clicked or to navigate to a different page? Easily define “triggers” and then select the action to be performed, such as going to another screen or opening a popup.

4. Try the app, share the app: At any point during the app design, try the app on the actual mobile device. Want to get feedback? Share the app so other people can try it.

5. Get the finished app: You’re done. Get the app to publish on the (mobile) Web or publish to an app market (native)

App Wrapup

Everyone wanted to build a Web site 10 or 15 years ago. In the beginning, you had no choice but to hire an IT professional to build it. Later on, easy-to-use tools started to appear and made it possible for people without a professional background to build a rich Web site.

Today, we’re witnessing a similar shift for mobile apps. Building mobile apps is challenging. Just as tools like WordPress made it very simple to build Web sites, cloud-based Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder now makes it very easy to build mobile apps. People without traditional IT experience now can build mobile apps—fast and easy.

The article was originally posted on http://mobiledevdesign.com/tutorials/you-build-mobile-app-today-tiggr-1011/

Awesome Webinar: Building Mobile Apps In The Cloud, With jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap

Join us next Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time and you will see how to build a real mobile app entirely in the cloud with jQuery Mobile, using Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder. In fact, as I build the app, you will be able to try it on your devices. Now that’s pretty cool! You will also see how easy it is to get native app using PhoneGap library.

Don’t wait, register for this cool webinar today.

Mobile Apps Builder – trial period is now 30 days!

Our Mobile Apps Builder had just 15-days trial period. We know it wasn’t enough. Starting today the trial period is now 30 days! You don’t need to give us your credit card, just sign up and try it. We are pretty sure you will love it, it’s super easy to build real mobile Web and native apps.

HTML5 Local Storage – Building a Sample App In Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder

HTML5′s local storage is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and most talked about features in the HTML5 technology stack. Local storage is part of Web Storage specification and is supported by all modern browsers (destkop and mobile). Although local storage (or Web Storage) sounds rather sophisticated, the functionality is very easy to use. You basically get a map as storage inside the browser (available to all browser windows). You can insert, delete or read key/value pairs. That’s it. Data stored in local storage (localStorage) will be there when you close and open the browser. There is also session storage (sessionStorage). As the name implies, it will be only available as long as the browser window is open, and will be cleared when browser window is closed.

The only other thing to know is that data saved by a page is only available for a pages from the same domain. In other words, a page loaded from abc.com, doesn’t have access to data saved by page from domain xyz.com.

We are going to going to build an app that looks like the screen shot below. In fact, you can try the app here (click the image, or scan the QR code). Try it on your mobile device as well.

To build the app, I used Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder. If you are wondering why Tiggr? Well, because it’s incredibly simple and fast to create a project and build app. If you don’t have an account yet, quickly sign up here.

First build the UI by dragging and dropping jQuery Mobile components from the palette on to the phone. At any point, you can click Test to try the app in browser, or mobile browser.

You can use Tiggr to build real mobile apps without writing any JavaScript. But, for more advanced cases (like ours), you can easily write any custom JavaScript. You can even import 3rd party JavaScript libraries. In our case, we are going to create a new JavaScript file (called asset) with the following content:

// save item
function save(item) {
  var size = localStorage.length + 1;
  localStorage.setItem('key' + size, item);
}
// get storage content
function storage(){
   var output='';
   for (i=0; i <= localStorage.length - 1; i++)  {  
      key = localStorage.key(i);  
      val = localStorage.getItem(key);  
      if (i == 0) {
         output = val;
      }
      else {
         output = output + '\n' +val;
      }
   }
   return output;
}
// clear storage
function clear () {
   localStorage.clear();
}

There are three functions, one for saving a new item (save()), one for getting the current storage (storage()) and one for clearing the content (clear()). Local storage API is very simple. For example, to save an item:

localStorage.setItem('key', 'item');

then, to get a value from storage:

localStorage.getItem('key');

This is how the complete file looks inside Tiggr’s JavaScript editor:

The last step is to invoke JavaScript when the buttons are clicked. We also want to load storage content when the screen is loaded for the first time. Let’s work on the buttons first. To invoke JavaScript on button click, we first add click HTML event to the button:

Then we add Run Custom JavaScript action by clicking the + button:

Click on the action to enter JavaScript code. The code for Save to Local Storage button looks like this:

var item =$('[dsid="input"]').val();
save(item);
var output='';
output = storage();
$('[dsid="storageContent"]').text(output);

We first find the input component using jQuery (it’s going to simpler to do that, once we introduce Tiggr JavaScript API, work in progress). Save the value from the input element, reload storage content so we can display it inside the textarea.

Clear Local Storage button looks like this:

clear();
$('[dsid="storageContent"]').text('');
alert('Local storage cleared.');

Lastly, we also add load event to the screen itself so that we can show storage content when the screen loads for the first time:

var output='';
output = storage();
$('[dsid="storageContent"]').text(output);

Try it yourself (it’s easy and fun!) and try the finished app here.

Book Giveaway: How Not To Write An App

How Not To Write An App is a great little book by Rod Cambridge (@appDebut, web site). Instead of telling you how to write an app (I’m sure there are plenty of books that do that), Rod tells you how NOT to write a mobile app in 10 fun, and easy to read lessons based on his experience building an iPhone Top-Tens app. However, the lessons and tips Rod gives in his book can be easily applied to Anroid, Windows Phone and mobile Web apps. It’s a great read and you can win a FREE copy (read below).

  1. Lesson 1: So what’s an app?
  2. Lesson 2: This is going to be so easy!
  3. Lesson 3: Research? Who needs it?
  4. Lesson 4: User Interface guidelines are for nerds
  5. Lesson 5: To-Do or not To-Do
  6. Lesson 6: An elevator pitch? Really!?
  7. Lesson 7: Why worry about the users?
  8. Lesson 8: Marketing, schmarketing…
  9. Lesson 9: Who needs Social Networks?
  10. Lesson 10: Who needs Developers?

Rod was nice enough to give FIVE free copies of his book to readers of my blog. To enter the giveaway, just enter your email address. One winner will be randomly picked each day.

Building Mobile Apps In The Cloud at GigaOM Mobilize

Next Tuesday, September 27, I will be presenting Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder at GigaOM Mobilize event in San Francisco. The session has a workshop format so I will build a real mobile app during the session – an app that everyone in the room can try as I build it.

The workshop starts at 12:45pm (Tuesday, Sept. 27).

Building Mobile Apps in the Cloud
Exadel’s Tiggr is a Cloud-based development platform for building mobile Web and native apps that uses PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile.In this workshop, you will see how to build and test cross-platform, cross device mobile Web apps consuming Cloud and Web services using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using a drag-and-drop visual editor.