GigaOM » Hybrid Apps

How to deliver the next-generation web experience

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 07:55:36 +0000

Delivering a positive web experience has become exceedingly more complex as the access environment has shifted from a desktop-centric vision to one that is increasingly focused on mobile devices. Mobilizing web design is a catch-22; adjusting to design challenges is costly, but not adjusting is equally costly, because a poor mobile web experience results in a loss of revenue. This report will examine what drives content consumption today and illustrate what the changing consumption of content has meant to the development and delivery of web and mobile content. It will also examine the evolution of the web experience and explore the challenges of content delivery to both mobile and desktop devices.

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Icenium taps the cloud for cross-platform hybrid app development

Ryan Kim — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:09:50 +0000

While mobile developers are increasingly connecting their apps to a cloud backend, the actual act of building an app still follows the old route of downloading an integrated development environment and building from one computer. But Telerik, a maker of Microsoft developer tools, is launching a new product Monday called Icenium, an “integrated cloud environment” that allows developers to access cross-platform developer tools in the cloud as services.

Icenium combines a cloud-based development environment with Apache Cordova, which powers the mobile development framework PhoneGap. But instead of requiring developers to download xCode, Eclipse, or the Android SDK, Icenium is able to move all of the tools to the cloud, so developers can conduct coding, simulating, debugging, deploying to devices and publishing apps from a Mac or PC.

What this means is that web developers can use Icenium to create cross-platform hybrid apps that are built in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and can run natively on iOS and Android, for smartphones and tablets. But they have the freedom to choose what computer they build on and what platform they build for. Meanwhile, they don’t have to download bulky IDEs. Icenium will be available for free until May 31, 2013.

With Icenium Graphite, an installed version for PCs, and Icenium Mist, which lives in a browser, developers can access an array of tools such as syntax coloring and formatting, real-time error detection, refactoring, code navigation, integrated version control and app publishing preparation.

One of the cool tricks of Icenium is a feature called LiveSync, which allows developers to immediately see changes in real-time on an integrated device simulator and across any connected devices without having to recompile code. Icenium Ion, another feature, allows testers to scan a QR code on their iOS device and get an app installed quickly without the need for provisioning.

Doug Seven, Telerik’s executive vice president who is leading Icenium development, believes this is the kind of tool developers, especially web developers need, allowing them to focus on building ideas and testing them out quickly instead of managing a lot of development environments.

“Icenium is a game changing solution that gives developers the access and ability to innovate quickly and easily, without being tethered to a place or specific platform,” Seven said in a statement.

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Adobe AIR & Its Hybrid App Dreams

Om Malik — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:00:56 +0000

For what seems to be an eternity, we have been promised seamless connectivity, high-speed connections that appear auto-magically out of thin air, giving us access to the wonders of the web — and of course, our data, including the unending stream of emails. Today, we have 3G networks, Wi-Fi in coffee shops and our homes, connections in office, trains and in some cases, even in planes. You would think that we are almost always connected.

And yet we have a growing number of companies — many of them with vested interest in the desktop PC paradigm — that are convinced we need to have a hybrid strategy when it comes to applications.

Adobe Systems (ADBE) is about to officially announce its desktop-webtop hybrid technology AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and related products for making rich Internet applications. Others have similar ambitions. Mozilla with its Prism initiative, Google’s Gears, Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX and Microsoft are trying to come up with ways in which our data lives in the cloud but is available on the desktop, aka locally.

I, for one, have been in this hybrid camp because it is hard to predict when we will have ubiquitous broadband. I first wrote about this trend back in March 2007 for Business 2.0 and pointed out that “the ability to work offline is crucial to overcoming consumer resistance to Web-based applications. The new offline mode will doubtless help with the adoption of many Web-based applications that are debuting right now.”

In December 2007, Anne Zelenka reminded us that despite all the hoopla, the initial attempts at hybrid apps didn’t prove to be all that compelling. Many of our readers felt that the hybrid applications need to present a new kind of value proposition that goes beyond offline access to all the familiar web apps.

Hopefully we will see some of them soon enough.

* Desktop Apps, reborn as hybrids
* Not Hot, Offline Web Applications.
* The Coming Apollo vs Firefox Battle.
* Why Google needs the desktop (& Adobe)
* Google buy Adobe

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