In this blogpost I want to give you a quick overview of the new structure, the setup, why we chose certain tech and how maybe you can draw some inspiration from our work.

Lets dive right into the nuts and bolts – a quick overview of how stuff works ^TM:

Content

In the past year a lot has happened at uxebu, new ideas were born, other ones where buried away – in essence we distilled out a concentrate of a few important factors we wanted to be reflected in the new website, while keeping some of the old ‘vibes’.

• We are a JavaScript tech company
• Our two sides of the coin are ‘business’ and ‘open source / incubator’ which we want to address much clearer
• The entire crew is what defines uxebu and we want to let that be reflected to the outside

We kept the site structure simple, basically one ‘CV’ style front-page, the team pages and our blog including articles and events.

Main focus of the front-page was to both showcase our commercial work and at the same time give insight into the open-source and incubating work we do – hopefully this distinction is clearly shown.

Tech

Our wishes for the new site are probably nothing new for most people setting up a website, but lets summarize anyways:

• Easy to maintain (preferably something like markdown)
• No CMS Xc%(*y$e(wy!!!!!!!!!!
• Support for most browsers, but no fancy tricks, if you support CSS3 gradients, good! If not, too bad
• Open source, all hosted on GitHub

These requirements resulted in us writing up a very simple markdown to HTML converter running on node.js.
Plain Markdown to HTML conversion was not enough in our case so we added the ability to define rendering blocks which you could use to map the Markdown tree to an object which then in return can be used as Mustache tags. This ensures that editing content stays super simple – I mean if you want, just browse the uxebu site on github ;)

Open source

The project is available on GitHub. If you have any questions or would like me to go into more detail on how everything works, feel free to leave a comment.

P.S.: Wait, did we just release yet another CMS ^TM ? ;) it just had to happen….

Uxebu is now operating it’s business purely in the JavaScript space for about three years (oh that reminds me we should have a party!). We are convinced that JavaScript is ramping up now and we see that there are more and more things done and possible with the language. The browser landscape is developing rapidly and changing every day. The mobile industry is pushing the limits and we are helping to do our part in it. We learned a lot and are still learning. As it is in the nature of our company to spread our knowledge to allow everyone to use the technology at it’s best and push the limits with us, we think now it’s the time that we share our knowledge and pass it on to those hungering for diving into JavaScript!

We really have gathered a lot of bright, bleeding-edge people and each of us is learning from another everyday. If you want to get some of the know how (at least as much as we can pass on in a two day workshop) you are invited to join our workshops. There will be one held in Munich 29th and 30th of June and another one in Amsterdam 11th and 12th of July. We will always have at least two uxebus teaching you the latest and hottest. We might even have some of the latest bleeding-edge mobile devices for you to run the app you will develop in the workshop.

Workshop Details

In this course we will cover a broad spectrum from JavaScript essentials to the bleeding edge of cross platform HTML5 development. We start from the ground up and go step by step, depending on the level of the participants we accelerate to show you the deep and dark sides of JavaScript.

Each day of the course is split into an intensive “knowledge transfer” session in the morning and a hands on hacking workshop in the afternoon in which you will apply the contents learned during the morning. At the end you will have touched all contents not only through theory but also through intensive real life application and coding.

Note that this course will not explain you how to work with jQuery and also not how to work without jQuery. The course mainly focuses on JavaScript, mobile and HTML5.

Day 1 (part 1) – JavaScript

We start with a small overview of the history. We tackle the basic structure of the language and move on with statements, expressions, functions and objects. We touch the different operators and when semi colons are introduced.

We continue our way through the JavaScript landscape by taking a look at objects, properties and built-in functionality. At that point we’ll encounter our first major obstacles; scopes and closures. Once we conquer these we touch on the difference between functions and constructors. This is followed by our second major obstacle; prototype and the various values of the this keyword.

Day 1 (part 2) – Hackday: HTML5, CSS3

During the second part of day one, we will take what we have learned in the morning and mix it with a little shot of HTML5 fanciness. We will look at all those new APIs we can now access on our (mobile) devices to bring JavaScript to a new level. We will include cool APIs such as the Audio API, Video API, history, Canvas, SVG, File API, WebGL, DeviceMotion, WebWorkers, WebSocket, GPS – and if all ingredients fit well you might just end up with your first app written in JavaScript.

Day 2 (part 1) – The App Day

During the second day we willl continue with timers, callbacks, web workers, eval and the future of JavaScript. The speed of the course is matched with it’s participants. The important parts of the languages will be handled in the workshop. During the first part of day two we will also specifically look into topics which you want to cover after determining those during day one. This will give you the chance to get all your open questions answered so that you have your pockets full of knowledge after the workshop is over.

Day 2 – part two (Mobile)

JavaScript has grown strongly into the mobile space, so we will show you how to get the app you have started building during day one onto mobile devices. You will learn about media queries, some device sensors, performance and HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript tricks and how to optimize some parts for mobile and how to make a native app out of it, so you finally could even make get it into the app store and make money with it.

Now you want to join our workshop?

Join us either

• in Munich 29th and 30th of Juneor
• in Amsterdam 11th and 12th of July

Coworking in Valencia

My week in Valencia started out to look very quiet and just pure work. I tried to contact some JavaScript/mobile/web guys in this area before hand, but somehow didn’t really succeed. Some tweets went around but I didn’t really reach anybody. But I made sure I have a great place to work at, which was Coworking Valencia, Rosa Montesa runs this place with so much passion – wow. And I just had to think of the Combinat56 Coworking space in Munich where we normally go, which is run by Sina with an equal lot of passion. Just great girls!

So I arrived there Monday morning to do my work, and off it went. I chatted a while with Rosa and some other coworkers and from there I couldn’t stop it. At the end of the day my calendar was filled with lunches and meetups. I met a lot of interesting people, first Rosa had organized a small come-together the next day with the company Brainstorm from right above, mainly hackers too, so we had quite some stuff in common. There I met Jorge who introduced me to more geeky people, thank you so much!

Spanish way of life

So the week went on and I tried to work a little bit, but I was basically so happy to live the spanish way of life a little bit. In the morning you don’t buy a take away coffee, actually you don’t see the busy people running around with their coffee mugs in there hands. I also just did that the first day, after that I adopted the spanish way, which is sitting down in a bar (also if it just for five minutes) and have a coffee. A lot of people there have a carajillo in the morning but that was not appropriate for my mornings :).
For lunch (later than normal for me, around after 2pm) we mostly went to some place outside, since it was at least 20°C, beautiful sun just perfect. And then on the way home you just take some tapas maybe a beer in the bar around the corner and late at night (normally after 9pm) we had dinner. For me working there felt really comfortable and easy going. But I have also heard that normally working in Spain is not normally that relaxed.

The real geeks

On Thursday I went to the BeCode guys’ office in the nice Barrio del Carmen. The first thing after I arrived was “let’s go for a coffee” :). That is the spanish style! We exchanged the ideas of how we work and the kind of projects we do. Xavi the daddy of BeCode (scnr) told me that they are an incubator and try to have people come in and realize their ideas, pretty cool stuff. Was so refreshing and forward-thinking, I felt home.
Funny enough that day I learned about Jasmine there, they used in a project. Unfortunately we had no internet that day, so I was pretty much offline until the afternoon, which was somehow good, but not when you really want to get some things done. So I promised to be back the next day and then the office was also really crowded and I got to meet all of the BeCode team. In the evening I joined my first coding dojo, this one was held in the offices of OpenFinance. We were given the task to write a roman to latin numbers converter in whatever programming language you like. You are given half an hour and try to get as far as you can, I joined forces with Jaume we got it easily done in the half an hour time, we simply used the webtestsuite as our testing framework since I know that one best and of course we wrote the converter in JavaScript :). As a second Kata you could hack the conversion the other way around. Jaume and I felt that this would be just another hacking it the other way job was, so we looked for a new challenge and we said let’s just use the google search engine for converting it for us and we just grab the result from there. We looked at a couple of APIs, at YQL but there was no real solution, so we went the scraping route. We got it almost done :). But as you can see and read we had lots of fun and enough beer!
Of course we went for dinner later and were still hanging out some time around Valencia and in the BeCode office later. There the guys told me about an Code Retreat which is going to take place somewhere near Valencia “en el campo” with Paella cooking and hacking, I hope that some of us uxebus may join, hope to find out details soon.

All in all a big thank you to all you guys and I can just say I had a great, though also really exhausting, two weeks in Spain. Hope to see you soon!

You do not only get to travel in uxebu. First and foremost we want to give you the opportunity and platform to accelerate the things you can do, show it to the community and enable you to reach more than you could on your own.
It doesn’t matter where you live! We are currently flirting with San Francisco too :).

But we are also a family company! We encourage you to have fun and put the priorities right. And family and health are top priorities at uxebu. As you can also see, as long as you like traveling and hanging out with the top geeks in our community you get to do that at uxebu, a lot. Because this is the bread and butter of high quality that we offer to our customers. And in order to become a top geek (which is one goal that we have for you at uxebu, if you aren’t one yet :)) you should be around those where you can suck know how and hopefully also give back and share yours as well.
You get the hardware that you need to work as efficient as possible. You prefer working at home or in a co-working space? No problem, feel free! Once in a time we meet some place and hack together for a couple of days, talk about our roadmap, find out where each of us wants to head and we figure out the way how to achieve reaching the goal we determine together. We normally meet some nice place, like at a lake or in the mountains. The last times we had both :). And we take the families with us.

Jens Arps joined uxebu in May 2010, he is the guy behind StorageJS, he is project lead for the just new dojo foundation member embedJS and is working on a really exciting HTML5 customer project that I can not link here :(. Stephan Seidt has hacked the newest (still unreleased) apparatio API, he is the one who does the node.js stuff in our team and WebGL is what he is passionate about, really passionate! I don’t have to say much about Tobias Schneider the guy behind Gordon, he has become famous over night, spoke at the last two JSConf’s and is our hard-core optimizer. David Aurelio has created TouchScroll and if you team him up with Tobias Schneider we have ALL JavaScript knowhow in da house, and they are currently hacking together on a really awesome project. Nikolai Onken a co-founder of uxebu is our social community front man and the party goer number one and besides that he has created HumanAPI and knows all the JavaScript guys around! Tobias von Klipstein is also guilty of founding uxebu and he is our Jack of all trades, he had created the first version of apparatio almost all alone.
Me, I write blog articles, sometimes. But I get to go to all parties anyway :).

If you are a JavaScript geek, love to walk along the edge of what is possible with web technologies and think that HTML5 is the rocket ship you should send us an email with some links to some of your projects and a short, convincing reasoning why you would like to work with us. And if you think that you can’t work with us because you are not ready yet, shoot us an email anyways and let us talk first and decide later. We are made of talented individuals each. But working together as a team is what makes us really strong. Be ready for it!

And btw get ready to learn something new every day. And do also pass on your know how!

What is it?

It‘s a JavaScript Toolkit, especially aimed at embedded devices. Embedded devices, that is phones, tablet devices, TVs, car dashboards and the like. Devices that are capable of running JavaScript. We are sure that this list is going to grow over time – and will hopefully one day also include devices like your fridge. EmbedJS is based on the Dojo Toolkit.

Why?

Because the toolkits and frameworks that exist focus on desktop browsers and therefore have a different approach – an approach we didn‘t find that suitable for embedded/mobile development. And the JS frameworks that target mobile devices are flawed, too: either they target only a specific device or platform, or they provide far more than we do need and want.

What we wanted was a toolkit that offered a unified API across different platforms, but with the best implementation that was available for each platform. And we didn‘t want to ship code that implemented a certain feature for, say, an old Blackberry device to an iPhone. Plus, we wanted that API to be small – enough to assist us in our daily work, but not that bloated that we would ship code to a phone that we wouldn‘t need in most of our projects.

The Dojo Toolkit

We at uxebu have a strong affinity to the Dojo Toolkit – most of us are committers – for a good reason: we believe that it has done many things right, and that it has an excellent code quality. Thus, finding a starting point for our venture to what was later to be EmbedJS was pretty easy: It was the very core of the Dojo Toolkit, dojo._base.

We examined the code and split it into its smallest parts (features, how we call them in EmbedJS). After having the features all nicely separated, we could look for the best implementation for each of the platforms we wanted to support, and put it into a separate file. Then we optimized our code, tweaking here and there, but also using the code from dojo._base as it was, because it already was the best implementation.

And we needed to find means to put all these tiny parts together again, respecting any given dependecies, to create a file that then contained all the feature‘s implementations for a given platform – so the EmbedJS Tools were born, including our highly flexible build system.

API

EmbedJS‘ API is a small subset on Dojo‘s API. It provides around 70 methods, from the fields language enhancement (like Array manipulation or JSON), OO (like classes and inheritance), transport (like JSONP or XHR), event system (like connecting to DOM events or methods), DOM manipulation (like style or node creation) and misc things like Promises or pub/sub.

We kept the method signatures intact so that you can import your existing knowledge from working with the Dojo Toolkit to EmbedJS. There are only a few minor changes where we
a) found a new name highly useful, e.g dojo.io.script.get() is embed.jsonp()
b) we needed to strip given functionality for the sake of code size.

All methods in EmbedJS are available under the embed namespace as well as under the dojo namespace. I.e. to call the connect method you can use dojo.connect() and embed.connect().

The full API documentations is here, though it‘s undergoing some updates right now.

Summary

I didn‘t want to dig too deep in the first article on EmbedJS, but I guess you got the point: EmbedJS is a highly optimized Dojo core, and offers you a specialized, optimal build for a given platform. To explain how the build system works, how we manage dependencies, how we separate our features and our implementations and how one can create a project-oriented custom build will need another blog post – but if you are too curious, you are invited to take a look at the source code at github; a lot is self-explenatory there. A further source of information is the EmbedJS project page, as well as the EmbedJS Tools source.

“Modern Company” session – uxebu as the example

But before I dive into the tech sessions I would like to mention that I really felt the need to hold a session which I had called “Modern Company” where I tried to show our philosophy at uxebu, how we work together, how we use the modern media, how it all came about and why we do it this way. First I didn’t know where to start. Then I started to talk about when and how the idea for uxebu came about, that we decided online to found it and really met some months later. Thanks to our open source background and our history we wanted to continue the same spirit inside the company, I tried to show how and based on what facts we grow our team (the word “hiring” seems such a one-sided process). I realize now that I forgot a lot of the good stuff, but maybe this is the chance to make this become a separate talk to hold at other events.
I really loved the discussion and the questions that it had started, notes had been taken, a lot of critical questions came up and had been answered by Tobias and me. One interesting mentioning came up about an article which mentioned a company that pays the same salary to all employees. Thank you for all this input, I really enjoyed it and will definitely talk about this more and will prepare some more info next time.

JavaScript – a topic of big interest

We had founded uxebu purely for doing JavaScript consulting and pushing the limits and it is just really exciting to see how much interest this language is gaining in the last years. Not only jsconf the mother of all JavaScript events underlines this but also a lot of other conferences and events like fullfrontal, fronteers, js1k, 10k Apart, jQueryConf and so on which Béla Varga listed in his “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” session.
The “node.js” session and “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” (by Béla (@netzzwerg) and Tobias Schneider (@tobeytailor)) made it very obvious that JavaScript is a hot topic, the BarCamp was not necessarily overcrowded with programmers, but still those two sessions had been very well filled and the discussions had been really fun. The conclusion of the “node.js” session that Tobias drew and evangelized was “node.js is currently very hyped and just not yet ready for production, so use at your own risk, it’s not even alpha yet”. Everybody also agreed that node.js is not the new saviour and a replacement for Apache, it’s another tool you should add to your tool belt, use it when it comes in handy and be sure to know how and when to use it. Final conclusion was, as usual, if you should use it depends on what you want to do :).
Béla opened up the “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” session by giving a very good overview of what toolkits exist out there, who created them and what they are good for. He very well layed out some of the advantages and disadvantages, the rough corners and what is hard and what easy to learn. Shortly the discussion about the right JavaScript IDE came up but as usual there is no one-fits-all solution, choose yourself! Everybody was very carefully listening when @tobeytailor dove deep into the details of ECMAScript, JavaScript, the differences, the latest specification, the changes, prototypes, __proto__ and so on. Other interesting topics in those sessions had been promotejs, vapor.js, details about storage mechanisms, jQueryMobile, embedJS, apparat.io
That was real “JavaScript Rock’n Roll”!

Native vs. Web

On Saturday, the first day of the BarCamp, I had offered a session “Mobile: Native vs. Web” but didn’t see too many hands raised, so I just didn’t put it in the schedule, later some people asked me when this session would take place and that I should hold it on Sunday, which I fortunately then did together with Florian Detig. And I have to say I am very glad we did so, because 1) we (at uxebu) have a lot of awesome stuff to talk about and 2) it was really fun interacting with the audience and passing on all this information. It is always amazing again how much there is to say about how to create an app which can also be submitted into any of the various app stores by just using web technologies (the adult industry proved that again). HTML, CSS and JavaScript are just way to underestimated for being of good use in the mobile world. Florian first showed his awesome slides (I think they are really cool!). I continued the talk and dove a bit deeper into the mobile web topic, after my try of explaining the different movements in the native API space with players like W3C’s DAP, BONDI, JIL, WAC we deeply went into answering and discussing web technologies on mobile devices, I talked about our experiences, showed some projects we realized and answered a couple questions.
Not really a surprise but still impressing was the positive feedback we got when I showed of apparat.io, our soon to be launched service that will be able to convert a web app into a native app (You want to know about it first – follow @apparatio). The release date for the private beta will be the 25th October 2010, people who follow @apparatio will get accounts first. I also showed our project embedJS a toolkit (based on dojo) optimized for mobile usage.

All in all the BarCamp just made it obvious again that we are playing in an very interesting field and that we at uxebu are pushing the limits, that is fun, as much as the BarCamp was big fun, we will be back next time, for sure!
Thanks again and keep up the good work!

• David Aurelio (of TouchScroll fame) – Interface Styling & Scripting for WebKit Mobile
• Jens Arps (our storage expert) – The hitchhiker’s guide to client side persistent data storage
• Tobias Schneider (the uncomparable Gordon author) – Not your Mother’s JavaScript!
• Nikolai Onken (a Dojo senior) – Robotic JavaScript

and if you think you have something as cool as what you will see at JSConf you should contact us and we should talk about working together. We at uxebu are putting fun in the job first, actually we are trying to have fun all day and just call that work. Family and health are the top priorities in our company and the absolute base for doing a great job … oh and JavaScript is what we love, currently we are hacking it only on mobile (or as we like to name it “embedded”) devices. “Embedded” because we think JavaScript is not only hot on mobiles, but on TV’s in car dashboards and maybe even in your washing machine :)!? You know where we are going … are you as enthusiastic as we are? Come and talk to us at the JSConf, or if you have no ticket for JSConf yet give us enough reason to invite you there and get to know your geekiness :).
Let’s rock the mobile/embedded world …
Write us to contact@uxebu.com or find us on twitter @uxebu.

The second day was mainly focused around mobile topics. Nikolai showed us how to think out of the box (which is your phone in this case) by talking about “Human APIs – expanding the mobile web”. I tried to give an overview about how to use web technologies for mobile apps by talking about “App vs. Widget – HTML5 Apps”. And as it seems we had hit a sweet spot there as the tweet proves. It seems we had found our slots there. It was fun to see that.
Find our slides below.

It was great to see Sony Ericcson show their PhoneGap based strategy. Since that is also part of our direction it is very encouraging to see that there is company on going this route. They showed a webbased build tool, which allows for a simple creation of runnable apps based on PhoneGap and also interesting ideas around native APIs and the security concept. A lot of triggers that made a lot of people think. Great input.
@creationix showed a cool demo using node.js, where we could all interact with his app. @divineprog showed DroidScript, which basically was a Smalltalk inspired realtime Rhino-based JavaScript runtime, that allows using native Android resources. We learned a lot around geo data, their handling and optimization in use from @tablackmore. Those are just some of the talks, they all were of high quality, so be sure to see them live next time.

At the mobile day we also heard talks about

• The New Mobile Web – A Web of Scripted Applications by @divineprog
• How to avoid the latency trap by @sh1mmer
• Handling spatial data on the web by @tablackmore
• HTML5 gives you wings by @mahemoff
• The phone in the cloud by Claes Nilsson and Thomas Bailey
• node.JS powered mobile apps by @creationix

All in all it was a great conference, I will look forward to be coming back next year.

Is the app store concept flawed?

Lately I have been reading more and more articles, tweets and blogposts stating their concerns about the fact that Apple almost randomly removes applications and that people for some reason have distorted views of the mobile application and app store reality.

I am not in favor of allowing any kind of application into an app store by default, there is no reason why you should have to do that (a bakery also selects which producs it wants to sell). The problem really is though, that Apple is running the only official app store for the iPhone. One app store controlling the entire market for a device is plainly wrong!

Not only does it cripple innovation but it also shows one major flaw of Apples strategy – the factor of competence. How on earth does Apple, a hardware and software manufacturer think it has the competence to judge whether an application should be admitted or not? Maybe in these days when mobile applications don’t go further than simple games or information display/exchange – but what if applications are starting to come with real security implications?

An example:
Imagine you are writing an application reading your heartrate and writing an ECG (This is not too far fetched, look at our research project HumanApi). Is Apple seriously trying to tell that they can judge whether such an app should make it into the app store or not? They by far don’t have the competence of the medical industry, no way!

A much more interesting app store concept would be to have certified stores by companies I trust (or community driven in other application use-cases). Looking at the medical example, wouldn’t it make much more sense if companies like Siemens, Phillips, and other medical device manufacturers start an alliance and run their own store, so I can trust the apps I am using, so that as a developer, I know that qualified people are judging my application? Not only would this guarantee much higher quality but it also would foster competition which we are lacking here.

Companies == lemmings?

Where does this “I need an app as well” come from? Why do people care so much when their application gets rejected by the Apple app store?

An example:
On february 23rd, large German online publisher Spiegel Online wrote an article about the fact that Apple might disapprove an application of the famous yellow press publisher “Bild“. On february 24th they posted another front-page article questioning whether legal means would be the only way to go?!?

Now that is insane, not only will it cost those folks a lot of money to run law suits against Apple, on top of that they are forcing their way into technology without future – already today, the Apple app store is not the only way to legally distribute your applications to the iPhone! Apple is a new player in the mobile industry and albeit its amazing achievements, never forget looking at marketshares.

To summarize: For whatever kind of reason, one of the biggest German online newspaper sees Apple rejecting applications as being threatening enough to write an article – how more blatantly can the reality be distorted?

What can and should we do?

Back to the surprising incident I was mentioning earlier: When the folks behind http://www.yourappshop.com showed me their application store – for the iPhone! – one thought came to my mind “Does the Adult Industry point the way (again)?” (whether you and I approve adult content or not is a different discussion, what we need to take out of this is the fact that they are showing a very viable way to go).

YourAppShop developed an app store entirely based on web technologies (lots of HTML5 which is supported by the iPhone browser and many many more devices) – which allows you to download web based applications to your homescreen, watch image slideshows, even videos. Everything works off- and online. To the well traveled mobile web developer all of this is nothing new, it is all part of HTML5. The folks of YourAppStore though were creative enough to build it so that the end-user does not feel the difference between a real native app (from the Apple store) and an application based on web technologies, payment for the service included!

Why don’t people (especially the folks in decision making positions) see that you can write amazing applications for the iPhone based on technology which also will work on other phones and which does not have to pass the QA of Apple?

If you are not too bothered about adult content (NSFW) take a look at http://www.yourappshop.com from within your iPhone browser and visit one of their stores – the way they have set up a viable ecosystem using web technologies will give you a new impression of what we actually are able to do today.

As much as people might have concerns with the adult industry, they are showing us how we can get out of the app store restrictions – technology of today can be used to write successful applications and you can be monetizing the potential (more than 8.000.000 downloads for YourAppShop should say enough), Now that sounds great doesn’t it @Bild.de and @Spiegel.de?

And as if its not enough, Apple itself is showing a great example of the potential of web applications running on the iPhone with their online help: http://help.apple.com/iphone – go visit their site, and add the application to your homescreen by clicking on the “+” button in the bottom toolbar (Not to mention the fact that iPhone applications where meant to be build using the web stack in the first place).

As an application developer/creator, your goal should not be to only run on one platform, unless you don’t care about having sustainable and solid business case or unless your target-group is only the group of iPhone users (which I can’t believe is ever true).

We showed that there is technology which allows you to write applications for more than one platform, technology which works whether there is an app store in between or not, technology which has a future, technology the web is built with – HTML/JavaScript/CSS or better, HTML5 apps. Use it and stop wasting time being afraid that Apple will ruin your business because they are rejecting an application – you shouldn’t have to care less!!

Conclusion

Jumping into the “We need to have an iPhone app” mantra without any second thought is very dangerous, its not good for your business. Analyze your requirements and check carefully if you can’t cover your needs with an application based on web technologies (which as we proved still can make it into the Apple store if they approve of your content). The advantage of applications based on web technology is overwhelming:

• Standardized technology stack (HTML5)
• HTML5 apps work in mobile browsers, can be distributed over app stores or even can be integrated into traditional websites.
• Much lower development costs.
• Huge amount of target platforms

Of course there are application cases where you need to access the devices hardware in ways the browser doesn’t yet allow you to (games or applications with extreme performance requirements for example) – but especially publishers and content driven apps should think twice.

If you are looking into building a mobile application and are not sure whether you should go for the native iPhone, native Android or any other native platform (and spend tons of money on it) or whether you should build on top of the much more open technology stack of the web, feel free to contact us and we can take a closer look at your requirements.

Back to the folks who are planning to sue Apple (VDZ) – start putting your apples into the right basket, build a web based application store as you can see with YourAppShop and you will have complete freedom over what you want to sell and what not. Your customers won’t feel the difference, they might even like it more because you can offer better prices (no profit sharing with Apple). Sueing Apple won’t help a thing, don’t waste your money and time.

What is EventNinja?

EventNinja is our little ninja that goes out and collects events :-). Seriously: we had started uxebu with the high goal of playing with the best and knew from the beginning that we can reach out to the interested and passionate crowd just by meeting up with them personally, at the various real-life events. So we just needed to show up at the WebMondays and BarCamps around us. We started keeping track of them in a Google Calendar, which is publicly shared (you can find it here http://bit.ly/webdev-events), because we know that we are not the only ones interested in upcoming developer events. During a very busy phase during the summer of 2009, where a lot of dojo.beers took place around the world, the calendar already was of big use. We started to write a small web site widget to embed the calendar in our site. We had a very focused and content-oriented use case and after coming across W3C Widgets, we quickly decided to port the web site widget over to a W3C widget – the same night we had it also running on an iPhone. This got the ball rolling and we realized that we should start porting this widget to even more platforms. From thereon we felt confident that we are on the right track. And we shall be proofen to be right.

The base of it all: HTML (and W3C Widgets)

The web stack is the widest spread and most widely used technology stack. The number of developers using the web stack is just unbeaten. Now that the mobile phones are coming around the corner, we see that the diversity (others call it fragmentation) is just huge. The iPhone proved, that even a good browser on mobile phones done right, can be fun. So the web stack is coming to our phones. Browsers are a standard on the phone. And the potential is gigantic. “The mobile industry has now 4.6 Billion active subscriptions.” and “71% of all phones have a modern xTML web browser.” says Tomi Ahonen in The Big Picture “All the Stats” Total View to Mobile Industry, 2010 Edition. Enough to justify HTML as the future standard for mobile apps!

So we can surf the web. But what about app development? The iPhone requires you to learn Objective C, Android wants Java, Nokia S60 a flavour of C++, and so on. This sounds no fun. So just sum up one and one. Let’s use the web stack (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that all the platforms bring along – since they all have a browser – and reuse this stack to build your native apps. It’s not as much magic as it sounds. There is even a specification for it, the family of W3C Widgets. W3C Widgets are self-contained mini-apps, consisting of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Just as we know it from websites. If the widget requires no resources from the web it can even run offline. You have all the power at hand: JavaScript, AJAX, Canvas and depending on the platform you even get SVG.
But how many platforms do support W3C Widgets? In plain numbers: 4. But the number is growing. Vodafone360, Vodafone’s Nokia S60, the latest Blackberry and Windows Mobile. But that’s not all as I will explain later.
The biggest hype is made by Vodafone, definitely. They are also expressing strongly that they are supporting the open W3C Widgets standard. And it is true, take a real W3C Widget throw it on any of the newer Nokia S60 (Series 5) phones or the Vodafone360 phones and it just works. The next closest is Windows Mobile. For getting it onto a Blackberry you need to additionally sign the widget.

More devices: PhoneGap

Supporting just those four platforms would be a bit boring. But here comes the great open source project PhoneGap onto the stage. PhoneGap opens up all the other platforms. Among them, probably the one most people look for, is the iPhone. PhoneGap provides a web runtime which we just wrap around our widget and package it and we have a native app. PhoneGap even allows to access the native functionalities like Camera, Contacts, Acceleromter, GPS, etc. If there is something missing in the list, you are free to write the according adaptor. And the big advantage, since you are deploying the runtime with your app, you can even hook onto any kind of native interface available on the phone. This is very nicely shown in the ECG app @nonken has written in our uxebu labs. This app connects a heart rate monitoring device to your iPhone, all done through PhoneGap.

Porting EventNinja

So we ported EventNinja to the iPhone using PhoneGap. It was a pleasure to use all the features one of the most modern browsers support, stuff like CSS transitions and alike. And since a lot of people asked, I will answer the question before it comes up: “Yes, you need the iPhone SDK and therefore a Mac OS X machine”. But we will see what the future brings.

With EventNinja, we have also proven that such an app can be ported to the Android platform. We have tested it on Android version 1.6 through 2.1, among them HTC Magic, Motorola Droid, Nexus One. Android was the easiest platform to port it to, we “threw” the iPhone version onto an Android phone and it just worked, first as a simple website. Later, thanks to Manfred Weber as a native app and finally, as you can find it now in the Android Market, as a PhoneGap-based app.
For the Palm Pre we adjusted the style to look as native as possible. To our surprise Palm’s operating system WebOS, which itself is web technology based, has some very strange, proprietary touches which made it less fun than expected (read more in Mobile Cross-Platform Development: Palm Pre). From a bird eyes’ view it looks like porting to WebOS would not require anything, no PhoneGap, just wrapping the widget properly. Unfortunately it was more work than that. The proprietary concept of stages and scenes requires some workarounds to finally get the app running.

Cross Platform Advantages

Besides the simple obvious reasons, like easy porting, lower development costs, and that the web stack technologies are our core business at uxebu, there are other reasons that make cross platform attractive. Let me scratch the surface by mentioning some of them.

Easy prototyping. Using HTML, JavaScript and CSS a prototype can be created in no time, iterations, reconsidering various issues is way cheaper and quicker than doing it with other technologies. We can use the browser window, just size it down to match a phone’s screen size. We can debug and fix things without costly redeployment cycles and this entire process can happen remotely, it all works over the web. Not to mention that this is the easiest way to distribute your app, but that is a topic of it’s own.

Largest Reach, synchronously. We can reach multiple types of mobile handsets virtually at the same time. By reducing the need to redevelop the app for multiple devices, we can roll out to multiple stores and devices at the same time. We are basically limitted by the time that it takes the stores to run the app through their internal QA.
As the numbers in the December 2009 Mobile Metrics Report show we are covering the biggest smartphone platforms well. The iPhone is definitely the leading one (on admob) but we all know that Android is picking up speed, as shown in the Metrics Update: Android.

Multi Channel Distribution. A very interesting though still underestimated channel of distribution is what taptu called the mobile touch web. The app works natively in the browser, so there is no need to even install it locally (if no access to native phone ressources is required). This opens up the opportunity for other apps or (mobile) web sites to directly link to and still allow for a (close to) native experience for the user. If you have an iPhone, Android or just a WebKit-based browser (even on your desktop) you can try out the EventNinja web app at http://eventninja.net/webkit.

The App Store Experience

Above I listed some cross platform advantages. And I would like to pick yet another one and focus a bit on it. The various App Stores. They do not only bring the burden to have separate upload and QA processes for each (which to solve could imho serve as a business model itself) but they also allow the user on the various device to find the app. What do I mean by that? Well, simple: The app store is a very prominent way to find very focused, use-case-centered information, services, in short: apps, for your phone. It could also be seen as the pre-installed search engine and payment gateway on your phone. All the handset manufacturers, operators and a lot of service providers are setting up or already running their own App Store, their portal into the world of apps. And deploying your app to many of them, allows to create multiple ways to retreive your app, across multiple networks, stores and devices.

Sounds crazy? Yes, it is. I am not a fan of all the App Stores, but that is the current trend. Let’s ride the wave, and be prepared for the next one, which will hopefully be the pure web apps, running in the browser without the App Stores inbetween. We are prepared. And a little band aid, to make it easier to put up with the multiple stores: there are services that will leverage this problem and aggregate the statistics from the various stores.

Conclusion

With this article we are showing very important aspects of the mobile web and that all this is no dream but reality. Go to your store and download EventNinja to see it yourself!

If you want to bring your product or website to several mobile platforms to gain most possible reach, feel free to contact us to discuss your specific needs.

Disclaimer: We are working for Vodafone in their Widgets Department.