As mobile OSes —
especially iPhone and Android — wax and wane, the pressing question remains:
How do you choose which mobile devices to develop for and which devices to omit
from your roadmap?
Cross-OS platforms
for mobile development on the whole are not yet a completely perfect,
have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution, but many of them offer an excellent
alternative to ignoring one mobile OS in favor of another or, perhaps worse,
burning serious resources to develop for two or three platforms at once.
Here are a few
cross-platform development tools that were recommended to us by sources we
trust. If you know of others or if you have any helpful tips about the
frameworks we’re mentioning here, please let us know about them in the
comments.
1. RhoMobile
The tagline “one
codebase, every smartphone” pretty much says it all. RhoMobile offers Rhodes, an open source, Ruby-based framework that allows
for development of native apps for a wide range of smartphone devices and
operating systems. OSes covered include iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, RIM
and Symbian.
The framework lets
you write your code once and use it to quickly build apps for every major
smartphone. Native apps are said to take full advantage of available hardware,
including GPS and camera, as well as location data.
In addition to Rhodes, currently in its 2.0 iteration, RhoMobile offers
RhoHub, a hosted development environment, and RhoSync, a standalone server that
keeps app data current on users’ mobile devices.
2. Appcelerator
When we polled
Twitter followers for recommended cross-platform tools, Appcelerator stood out
as a fan favorite.
Another FOSS
offering, Appcelerator’s Titanium Development Platform allows for the
development of native mobile, tablet and desktop applications through typical
web dev languages such as JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and HTML. Titanium also
gives its users access to more than…Read
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