Lowering the Barriers to Entry in Mobile app Development

The creative firm I work with out in Utah, Purple Raincloud, is really stoked on the potential for  growth in the mobile application market.  Scratch that --reality of growth.  Clients want them, and we want to build our own.  We have good relationships with some talented local iPhone developers, but my own experience is with web app development.  For this reason, I was excited to hear about a new platform that makes it easier to get in the mobile app development game.

What’s this new technology? It’s called Appcelerator Titanium, and it aims to bring to mobile app developers the benefits of rapid prototyping that are enjoyed by web developers.

And boy, does it ever. How so? It abstracts the functionality of native iPhone and Android development through a Javascript API. So instead of using Objective-C or Java to create your app, you create the functionality with Javascript (including your favorite JS libraries like YUI or jQuery) and lay it out with CSS. In other words, if you’re comfortable developing a dynamic web page, you are 90% of the way there — you are about a day away from launching your first iPhone or Android app.

What’s the other 10%? That’s the Titanium API I mentioned, which gives you access (through simple Javascript) to the native functionality that makes mobile apps what they are, like GPS, the phone’s camera & accelerometer, etc. Not only does the API provide access to utilities like those, but it also gives you the ability to skin and theme your app just like a “regular” native app. Tabs, menus, gestures — it’s all there.  I was able to get a modified version of their sample TwitPic client up and running in under a day (mine used Posterous and took advantage of Titanium's Geolocation API for accessing my phone's GPS capabilities), and much of that was spent getting my Linux machine to recognize my phone as an Android device.

It's unlikely that you will yet be able to match the speed and feature set of a native app, but for many apps, this could be a great tool for proof-of-concepts or even production deployment.  And I say "yet" because the Appcelerator team is talented, dedicated, and has shown their willingness to engage with the developer community to address issues and help out with problems.

Within 24-36 months, their will be more mobile devices accessing the internet than home broadband connections.  They're not all smartphones, yet, but the potential for this market cannot be ignored either by traditional companies or the design and development firms that help them create their web presence.  Soon, not having a mobile-compatible site or dedicated mobile app will the equivalent of not having a website at all just a few years ago.  So take a look at Titanium, especially if you don't have the time or personnel to delve into Objective-C or the Java-based Android SDK just yet.

About the Author
Jeremy Raines is a web developer and snowboarder living in Park City, Utah. If you'd like to learn more about how you can use Posterous to both streamline and amplify your social media efforts, shoot him an email at jraines@gmail.comor follow him on twitter.

Tying Your Social Media Strategy Together With Posterous

So you've taken the plunge into social media. You've got a nice Facebook fan page, a blog giving your company's perspective on the goings-on of your industry, and half your company is on Twitter. But it all seems a bit disjointed, and you'd like a bit of strategy beyond "be genuine". You've pretty much got that down from the first hundred social media "gurus" you bumped into since jumping on this wagon. 

Enter Posterous. Posterous is a simple blogging service that might be better described as a social media megaphone. It can be integrated in minutes with all your favorite profiles: Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr; you name it. All you have to do after that is send emails to post@posterous.com, and it creates a blog post on your Posterous site (complete with any photo, audio or video attachments) AND pushes it out to all the profiles you've told it to integrate with. It also does a lot of neat tricks with the content you send it; for example -- if you send it a bunch of photos, instead of one huge post, it makes a nice AJAX-ified gallery. If you send it a photo with geocoordinates, it will not only post that photo but a Google Map showing where it was taken.

If you feel a little buzzed after wielding so much social media power with a single email, don't worrry -- you've entered the Buzzword zone. What's hot for 2009? If buzzwords are any indication, it's Location Based Services and the Real Time Web. What does that mean in practice? Take another look at that trick Posterous can pull off with geotagged photos, and consider this scenario: you've got a line of beverages. Could be flavored water, energy drinks, local microbrew, whatever -- we'll call it Glug. On a nice summer weekend day, you load up a case and cruise over to some of the larger apartment complexes in town and head to the pools, where there's guaranteed to be a crowd. Find a photogenic group of sun worshippers, hand out a few Glugs, and snap some pictures. Shoot those pics over to Posterous with a friendly message, and suddenly your whole diaspora of online friends and followers is invited to a pool party*, with your product front and center. And who doesn't like being invited to a pool party? Even if they can't make it, they still get the message that there are people enjoying your product,right here, right now.

Of course, this type of thing can be spun many different ways. Maybe you don't have a product, but you post a video interview with someone at a local coffeeshop about your web service and tie that with some sort of giveaway for people who drop by. Or maybe you post the location of a "secret concert" if you're a musician. It's all about being creative -- which, really, is not the point here, because all effective media is about being creative; the point is how easy Posterous makes it to take advantage of different kinds of media distributed across different kinds of social sites.

If there's a drawback to Posterous it's the lack of any ability to customize the visual presentation of your actual Posterous site. It's nice and clean; but it looks the same as everyone else's. It is possible to fully embed your main Posterous stream into another site, but this is a little more complicated than the average web user is going to want to wrangle with. However, the Posterous team is rolling out useful features on a regular basis (see blog.posterous.com) and I have no doubt this feature is coming in the future. In the meantime, it's already insanely useful as a unifying hub for your social media efforts.

*In practice it would obviously be best to work this out with the management of a complex in advance -- but most would be all ears, as it's good P.R. for them, too.

About the Author
Jeremy Raines is a web developer and snowboarder living in Park City, Utah. If you'd like to learn more about how you can use Posterous to both streamline and amplify your social media efforts, shoot him an email at jraines@gmail.comor follow him on twitter.