'Net Features : appcelerator

App Development with a Local Flavor

Michael Garrity — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Adding background location tracking and geo-fencing to your latest application just got considerably easier.

Popular app development tool provider Appcelerator is including Geoloqi services to its Titanium 2.0 platform. This means that Appcelerator’s 1.6 million iOS and Android Titanium-using developers will now be able to include geo-triggered events into their applications, and Geoloqi’s technology was designed to do so in a simple, battery-efficient way.

Using carrier signals, GPS, Wi-Fi and indoor tracking systems, Geoloqi is able to help apps track where a user is, which means the app can then present messages or trigger actions based on their location.

New Titanium developers can get a two-month free trial from Appcelerator if they register and download the Geoloqi Titanium module by the end of June.

Google Challenges Facebook for Mobile Developer Attention

Michael Garrity — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:35:00 GMT

Mobile application development platform Appcelerator recently teamed up with the International Data Corporation (IDC) to analyze the social mobile application landscape, and their results show that Google is poised to give Facebook a run for its mobile money.

After surveying nearly 2173 Appcelerator application developers across the globe, the surveyors found that most of them have a rapidly growing interest in social mobile. These developers also feel that Google will be the key to implementing their social strategies over the next year because of the company’s “broad range of assets,” including Android, Gmail, Google+ and YouTube, among many others.

Google’s various offerings make the company an important figure in the social mobile world because of their closely linked integration with one another; 39 percent of the developer’s questioned said these Google assets are actually more important to their upcoming social mobile development than Facebook’s social graph. Overall, though, developers reported that they don’t feel like they have the proper knowledge or tools to take full advantage of social in their application strategies.

“This translates into a big competitive opportunity for Google – and potential significant risk for Facebook – especially because developers perceive Google as innovating faster than Facebook,” says IDC’s VP of Mobile & Connected Consumer Platforms Scott Ellison.

Unfortunately, it’s not all great news for Google. The survey also reveals that Android is seeing waning interest from developers because of its continued fragmentation, effectively propelling iOS much further ahead in terms of developer attention.

Meanwhile, HTML5 appears to be moving to the center stage with both pure mobile browser apps and hybrid apps, making it a new challenger to the long dominant native apps that have pretty much always ruled the mobile development arena.

Appcelerator: Mobile Dev in Focus

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:35:00 GMT

Appcelerator, a platform for developing native mobile, desktop, and iPad applications announced that it is now powering over 4,000 mobile applications in the iPhone and Android app stores.

That is pretty impressive by itself, but it gets better - four of the apps developed on Appcelerator’s Titanium platform have hit number one in their category and major brands like eBay, NBC, MTV, and Budweiser have developed multiple applications. Intrigued yet? Keep reading.

Big brands are seemingly and clearly quite attracted to Appcelerator (which may just motivate you to check it out, too): NBC released Jay Leno's Garage, MTV released an avatar-personalization app “Jersey Shore Yourself”, Budweiser released “Bud Light HFL” for the iPhone and Android platforms through its advertising agency Tribal DDB. The list goes on and on.

“Since the release of Appcelerator's all native platform in March, we have seen an exponential increase in the pace of application development," noted Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. "Some developers are on their sixth app in just a few months, and several have seen their applications hit the top of the charts."

The attention paid to mobile is well warranted but is it the dominion of big brands with even bigger budgets? It certainly still requires development time, creative and marketing resources to develop a competitive application – something which many businesses may not have to spare.

SugarCRM Announces Sugar iPad App

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:23:00 GMT

Open source CRM software SugarCRM made what I consider a whopper of an announcement today at its SugarCon Conference - a customizable SugarCRM application for the iPad.

Features of the application included a quick view display to see the most urgent opportunities, important contacts and upcoming meetings. A Customizable Modules Screen wnables users to drag-and-drop their favorite modules to organize the app according to their needs. Data synchronization is also available so keeping contacts and other information synced between the iPad and the cloud will be possible.

“We’re pleased to announce a native application of Sugar on the iPad,” noted Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. “The ultra-portability and groundbreaking iPad user experience that is made possible for us as a web-based business by Appcelerator fits perfectly with the extensible SugarCRM architecture that can scale across multiple platforms. We believe that our mobile workforce customers will benefit greatly from the enhanced capabilities that this new platform offers.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is that SugarCRM used Appcelerators Titanium open source platform for building the iPad applications. This will enable SugarCRM to port its application to other mobile platforms including Android and Blackberry by using a single Titanium codebase.