John M. Wargo

The View just published my review of Teamstudio Unplugged, a mobile application platform for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino applications. The platform allows you to take an existing Notes application and mobilize it to the Unplugged client. Unplugged is essentially a mobile replication engine for Notes and BlackBerry (today, support for Android and iOS is coming soon).

Developers use Xpages to craft pages that control how your Notes application data renders within the mobile application. The platform allows you to have more control over how things render on the mobile client, but requires more work to do it than Kryos AppXtender. It's really cool though how Teamstudio was able to implement this without requiring any additional software on top of a Domino server and out of the box Domino Designer.

Teamstudio offers a free single user developer license for you to try out the platform. You can find additional information about the product at www.freeyourapps.com.

The article is called Mobilizing Domino Applications Using Teamstudio Unplugged, check it out if you're a subscriber.

I've got an article being published soon that digs into how to use Teamstudio Unplugged to mobilize Notes applications. I had a lot of fun working with their platform and found it to be a very interesting implementation. They created a synchronization engine and client-side development environment for mobile applications without requiring any plug-ins or additional development tools beyond two Notes databases and out of the box Domino Designer. Cool stuff.

I've finished my work with PhoneGap. I took the BlackBerry Widget application I built to access my contact lookup web service and plunked it into PhoneGap and quickly built mobile applications for BlackBerry and iPhone. It was a very interesting project and I've written all about it in an article I've submitted to The View (www.eview.com). It was a lot of fun to work with the framework, but as with many open source projects, there's still a lot of work to be done to get everything working across all supported mobile platforms.

I've started work on what the View calls a Thought Article - something I'm currently calling 'Preparing your Domino Developer Mind for Mobile' which tries to cover the process you go through as you prepare to mobilize a Notes application. I was going to work on finishing the article tonight, but I think I'll wrap it up tomorrow then give it a final read before passing it off to the View for publishing.It's basically a collection of my thoughts on many different aspects of Domino mobile development. Could be fun.

Next up is an article about how to use Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAP) to mobilize Domino applications. In my job at AT&T I work with most of the major MEAP vendors and this is really cool stuff. I've asked some colleagues to help me build mobile applications using each of the MEAPs so I can compare and contrast them in the article.I'm going to start writing that one next week.

I'm also working with a colleague to write an article about how to build mobile applications for iPhone that talk to Notes databases. I tried to do this myself about 18 months ago and while I was able to get it 'working' I thought I'd engage a real iPhone developer to help me finish the article. Contrary to popular belief, iPhone development is much harder than development for any other mobile platform I've worked with, so it's been very hard for me to get this particular project done.

I received a BlackBerry PlayBook at the newly renamed BlackBerry World Conference in Orlando this year. It's an amazing device and except for a few little hardware and UI things (which I know will get fixed) I love it. I'm going to write a series of short articles on the PlayBook just to provide you with my feedback and to give you a general idea of what I think of the device.

One of the things I've been trying to do, and have not been able to figure out how to do, is to move PlayBook applications onto different tabs on the PlayBook home screen. I can't find any way to create my own folders nor have I been able to figure out how to move applications onto tabs. I'd like to setup a tab for my personal applications (vs. work apps) and move some apps there, but I cannot figure out how. I noticed something funny this afternoon which provided the subject for this post.

Take a look at the attached photo - I can't move apps where I want them to be on the PlayBook, but someone at RIM has apparently decided that the BlackBerry World Conference Application is a game. Makes no sense to me.

Another question I have, and this applies to many smartphone platforms, why can't you have a longer application title and have it wrap on the screen? There's no reason why those application titles should be truncated when there's so much extra room available on the screen. Makes no sense to me.

I came across an article in APC Magazine this week that discusses problems developers have with cross platform mobile development. The article is called Smartphone Devlopment: Going Cross Platform and what interested me was what was being said about iPhone development.

There’s this perception in the market that since the iPhone platform is so cool and the apps are so beautiful, that it must be easy to develop for the platform. There’s so much bias out there in favor of the iPhone that it is hard to get an honest assessment without appearing bigoted against iPhone.  I did some iPhone development in preparation for a conference presentation last year and even though I had more than 20 years of experience as a professional software developer, the development approach to iPhone development and the archaic Objective-C were so hard to work with that I wasn’t able to finish the application in time for the conference session. I worked on it for weeks and weeks and had to give up because it was just incomprehensible to me.

Apple Macintosh and iPhone development is done using technologies Apple obtained when it purchased NextStep back in the 80’s. Objects such as strings start with NS, NextStep, so instead of working with Strings, you have to work with NSStrings. Why they can’t be just strings makes no sense to me, but that’s the way it is. The iPhone platform has no garbage collection capabilities – developers have to track everything and make sure memory is freed up when an object is no longer used. Everything is a pointer; there’s no direct access to variables, it’s all pointers to variables. It’s very 1980’s.

I laugh when I hear people complain that the BlackBerry development stuff is ‘old’ – I’m old enough to know that the iPhone stuff is even older. Most modern languages have some sort of garbage collection mechanism. BlackBerry and Android have it because of their use of Java. Not true in iPhone development – you have to do the work yourself.  Ugh!

Let’s take a look at some important tidbits from the article:

“Going to iPhone development feels like a backwards step from programming in managed environments like Java and .NET, where memory management, exception handling and the like are automatic,” 

“The iPhone stuff is still in the dark ages in terms of programming environments: you’ve got to keep track of everything,” he continues. “Objective C tries to make sure everybody understands who’s responsible for freeing up what, but it feels like going backwards; being able to have Java-like memory management makes a big difference for developers.”

In a rapidly-growing market where iPhone support is the de rigeur standard for developers and a necessary step to access the world’s largest and most successful App Store, Powell’s comments may sound like heresy. But with Android having rapidly emerged as a viable alternative over the past year, it reflects the growing realisation among many developers that iOS is no longer the be-all and end-all of mobile operating systems.

Needing to build and maintain two or more versions of a smartphone app raises the difficulty level of many development projects significantly, particularly for small developers. “iOS and Android are very different platforms," says Bradby. "Someone who's skilled in Java say, doing Android, is not necessarily and unlikely to understand the Objective C and XCode development environment for iOS. Having a team of developers that can maintain both of those code bases is difficult; there’s no way we can do native development on more than two platforms.”