Droidcon India

A review of some popular cross-platform tools, and introduces a new approach and Kirin, an implementation of that approach.

Outline

We’ve heard a lot about Native versus Web in 2011. This talk isn’t about that.

We’ve heard a lot of packaging the web as a native app – building apps out of web technologies that look and feel like native apps.

We’re beginning to hear that this isn’t working out so well.

So where do we go from here?

Clients are still asking for native quality, but at mobile web prices. They still want to release the same app on multiple platforms, without breaking the bank.

This talk explores the space between native apps and web technologies; focusing in particular on DOM-less Javascript.

This is becoming an interesting space with products like Titanium, Game Closure and DirectCanvas. And it is still a massive space to explore.

This talk will also see the introduction of our own exploration, and a case study of building a large successful multi-platform app with it: the official Glastonbury 2011 app.

Speaker bio

James currently works at Future Platforms, designing and building software for the extreme limits of mobile phones - underground, up mountains, and at muddy, outdoor festivals.

He has a long history of geekery, writing software for small, imperfectly formed devices upto big and hairy distributed systems. Outside of mobile, his specialist subject is biologically inspired artificial intelligence.