The turning point

In the last months of 2010 Apple has removed many restrictions in its developer agreement and published guidelines about the apps it will accept and reject.

Between these restrictions there was also the impossibility to submit to the appstore apps built using the packager for iPhone.

Flash on the iPhone ? really ?!

No, not really.

This is made possible by a Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure developed to understand AS3 code and able to output native ARM assembly code.

Porting to iPhone/ipad your AS3 projects is pretty easy and through the Packager for iPhone and Air for Android you can theoretically develop cross-platform application that looks exactly the same regardless the device it runs on.
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Research in Motion will launch a cloud-based capability for its popular BlackBerry Enterprise Server by the end of 2011, RIM officials said Thursday.

The launch of the cloud capability could depend on either partners, such as telecommunications carriers that would host the BES service, or it could be hosted by RIM itself, said Pete Devenyi, vice president of RIM’s communications platform group. “We’re not yet saying how it will be rolled out,” he said.

RIM’s architecture for a cloud-based BES creates an open BlackBerry Common Messaging Interface between various mail adapters and BES Services software as well as a BES database.

Read more details here.

The Forum Nokia Developer Summit will take place in London – September 14-15. This year the Nokia Developer Summit is held in conjunction with Nokia World. As Nokia’s biggest event, this offers you new opportunities to meet professionals from every part of the mobile industry. You’ll also find big-name guest speakers, business streams, and an Experience Lounge packed with the very latest products, services and solutions.

Take a look to the official event website for more info.

Youtube mobile website got a major update today including a faster and more finger-friendly user interface. Youtube also announced that YouTube Mobile now receives more than 100 million video playbacks a day, a good reason for a big update. Watch the presentation video below:

Hi all, what I’ve been into lately is testing some tools for getting a descent cross platform development framework. What I’ve been testing most was PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium, Golden Gecko and Whoop. The last 2 are not open platforms neither do they target developers (but rather designers) so I won’t mention them any further. For those of you who may be interested you may contact the guys for a demo. The first 2 are open source. Read more »

Few days ago Sencha just released the first HTML5 framework targeted for mobile devices: Sencha Touch.

As stated on Sencha’s website:

It comes with a comprehensive UI widget library, complete touch event management with CSS transitions and an extensive data package.

If you have an HTML5-ready browser, you can take a look the demos here.

Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run where it previously couldn’t and better interoperate with webpages where it previously could. With Smokescreen you can reach new platforms without learning any new tools; your Flash is automatically converted to JavaScript/HTML5.

Smokescreen will soon be released for free under an open source license. I tested some demos with my iPhone 3GS and, while performances on the iPad seems to render very well, on the iPhone there’s still some work to do. I really look forward to test the tool after the release, so, stay tuned!

Since there’s a lot of buzz around mobile Web, I’ve decided to publish a first series of guidelines that will hopefully help both Web and mobile developers to face this new opportunity.

You can read the 2 articles on my blog on Forum Nokia:

• Mobilising websites: guidelines for WRT Widgets development, part 1
• Mobilising websites: guidelines for WRT Widgets development, part 2

Feedbacks are welcome!

While W3C is still working on its Best Practices (BP) for the Mobile Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/) one of the BPWG members, who was obviously not too happy with how the candidate recommendation was evolving, decided to create a separate set of practices.
This is how the “Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web” (GAP) came about:http://www.passani.it/gap/

The W3C fugitive is Luca Passani of WURFL fame. Will the new set of guidelines fill a GAP in the documentation for mobile developers?

Related Link: http://www.passani.it/gap/