Marvin Lee Dot Net

I found out that you don’t need to have Apple Mac OS to develop iPhone Application.

Previously I found out that the limitation of iPhone SDK only works on Apple Mac OS X Leopard machines and it was a letdown or a big hurdle to try developing iPhone applications.

That was until a friend, Kai Shen gave me a link to MobiOne.

There’s no need for the iPhone SDK or a separate Palm Pre IDE or even to have a certain operating sytem to take advantage of smart devices.

MobiOne is a desktop software (currently available for Windows only), that has emulator for iPhone and the Palm Pre.

Before you start to get all excited, it doesn’t really work like the iPhone SDK.

The emulator only acts like an emulator, or to be specific, a HTML browser for your ‘iPhone application’. 🙂

The Palm Pre version.

The Palm Pre version.

You can open a local HTML file or online site and access it like an application.

The software acts like a tool and has DOM Inspector, Profiler and also Debugger for your javascripts.

There is also a Geolocation feature where you can change your Latitude and Longitude to test your location-based app.

It might not be a full iPhone SDK replacement, but I think it does get the job done if you’re planning to create applications in HTML.

It is useful for application developers such as the one who developed PJNation.com.

So if you’re thinking of developing iPhone apps the quick and dirty easy way, and don’t mind people checking out your source code, I’d say go HTML and javascript! 🙂

Thanks to Kai Shen for the tips!

Software, Technology Apple, Apple App Store, HTML, iPhone, iPhone Dev Center, javascript, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, MobiOne, PJ Nation, pjnation.com, SDK

Let’s get started with OpenSocial.

If you have no idea what OpenSocial is yet, get a head start here where I introduce OpenSocial briefly and see if you have the interest to learn more?

What’s OpenSocial?

In simple term, OpenSocial is a platform or a set of API for developers to create application that could run on all websites (especially social networking websites) that support it.

Websites like MySpace, orkut, hi5, LinkedIn, Friendster and a list of other sites are supporting it. So if you’re developing OpenSocial application, it could be made available to all of these sites and used by a lot of people. 😉

Those websites supporting OpenSocial API are called containers. At the time writing, OpenSocial latest version is 0.8.1 but version 0.9 is coming out soon.

Different containers would have implemented different version of OpenSocial API. You would need to make sure that your application version can be supported by the containers you wish to implement. So if a social network is running OpenSocial version 0.7, and you have an application built with 0.8 API, it might not run if you’re using 0.8 specific API. However, if your application is built with version 0.7, all containers of 0.8 API will be able to support it.

Official website of OpenSocial is at http://www.opensocial.org/and as Google is the initiator of OpenSocial platform, Google’s OpenSocial resources site is at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

So what skills do I need to start with OpenSocial?

OpenSocial API is a Javascript based API and it makes server side calls via REST/RPC protocols. It doesn’t matter what your server technology is though.

This FAQ page should find answers to some basic questions you might have.

If you’re ok up until here, and you’re ready to get started to make one great OpenSocial application, start with the Getting Started Guide.

Or you can spend some time watching the tutorial videos from this playlist to get an idea how OpenSocial works before I start showing how you can easily create your own OpenSocial applications. 🙂

Oh yes, OpenSocial does not only allows you to make applications for different containers, you can host OpenSocial applications yourself, in your website too. But that part is for another post. 🙂

Google, Internet, OpenSocial, Technology Friendster, Google, hi5, javascript, LinkedIn, MySpace, OpenSocial, Orkut