Synthable
Web & Mobile Application Development
NameThat 1.1b released today
Aug 12th
I pushed out version 1.1 beta for the Android port of Grasscove’s NameThat today. It’s a minor release with only a couple of changes. First there are some UI improvements and we added a word list buffer to prevent duplicate words per round. Not much in the update, but it brings me to a milestone in development. The stable release of 1.1 should be out by the end of August.
The next version is going to be 1.5. With 1.5 we’ll be adding more UI improvements, specifically to the Play interface. We’ll also be adding a backend service for players to upload the words they have added to their library, as well as use words from it. This will create a centralized database of different words and we hope this will give the users an ever changing list to play games with, powered by the community.
Look for NameThat 1.5 to be released late 2010 or early 2011!
WebOS and the future
Aug 6th
I bought a almost new Version Palm Pre Plus today from a gentleman who had won/received it at an event. He already had a Pre, so he was selling this one since he doesn’t use it. Everything looked to be in great shape so we picked it up for at a really cheap price.
I want to start doing some WebOS development and thought it was best to have an actual device in hands to test with. Using Palm’s tools we were able to flash the phone into developer mode, which enabled WiFi by default since there is no EDGE or 3G connectivity.
A few reasons why we want to do a some WebOS apps.
First is WebOS itself, being a web based OS it’s perfect for somebody like me with a web development background, especially with JavaScript. Making the switch should be pretty smooth and painless.
Second is HP recent acquisition of Palm. One major reason we didn’t pick up a WebOS device a while ago was because of price, and we weren’t sure if Palm would be able to stick around. But with HP taking up Palm, we think that opens up the possibility for a great hardware manufacturer to make some great devices that run WebOS. HP has said their main motive in purchasing Palm was to break into the mobile and small device space. HP has already announced they will be making a tablet running WebOS along with some printers, and there is a very good chance they will be producing some smart phones and other cool devices.
Third is the market base. Most probably look at WebOS as a lost cause, but there are people who use it and we think that will only grow in the future. The attractive part of developing for WebOS right now is there isn’t much market competition. If you go into Apple’s AppStore or the Android Market, you have a lot more competition than you do with the App Catalog. Your app gets more exposure because of all the smaller app base, and there are more opportunities to fill a niche that has yet to be filled.
So we think my first WebOS app is going to be a port of NameThat. That seems like a good starting point to me.
Android 2.2 C2DM
Aug 3rd
The Cloud 2 Device Messaging (C2DM) service is only available to Android 2.2+ devices and adds a robust push style system to Android. With C2DM server side code is able to initiate communication with devices that are registered for it’s service. This means the end of the poll system for applications to receive network updates, which can be very costly on the battery and use a lot of unneeded network resources. The C2DM service would allow the backend service to notify the application that new data is available, eliminating the need for the application itself to check in various intervals for new data. This is a push style system vs a pull style system.
Well we received an e-mail this weekend saying that Google has accepted my application to use the C2DM service for Android devices. Google has been allowing some developers beta test this service before opening it to the public. We submitted my application the first few days of July and I’m just now getting accepted into the beta, so it’s been a while. However they have granted two of the emails we submitted for use of the service, so we have two separate C2DM lines of communication. This is exciting because it now makes the dynamic content applications much more viable without hogging all the resources.
I applied for the beta because we have a project in mind that would greatly benefit from this push style system. Look for it to be announced and released for beta testing in the next couple of months!
