Two new mobile development tools - TagsMe and Cascada Mobile
TagsMe has a list of very impressive demo videos to show how easy it is to develop mobile applications using its GUI Editor and XML-based language. I am impressed not only by its mobile client, but also its Netbeans based IDE. Everything seems to be well polished.
Cascada Mobile takes a completely different approach. Instead of letting the developers deal with mobile geared markup languages, they can just use standard xHTML, CSS, and Javascript to write applications. Cascada Mobile provides tools to convert them automatically to mobile Java applications (MIDlets). Interesting enough, the development tool is an Eclipse plugin.
Back to the year of 2003, I read an article on MSDN, which was talking about why a startup company should avoid entering development tools (IDE specifically) market. I was kind of involved in mobile development tool at that time, so I remember that article very clearly. I could not find the original article now, but the main reasons are:
(1) IDE needs heavy investment and
(2) the customers for IDE are very picky, because they are developers themselves
With über IDEs and RCPs like Eclipse and Netbeans, the situation has been changed dramatically now days. The barriers to entry for development tools are much lower.
Hi Wendong,
Thank you very much for your kind words. If somebody is interested, I was interviewed this month on http://www.netbeans.org/community/articles/interviews/dreamprofile-urrutia.html?intcmp=925655
In that interview, I explain what is TagsMe™ and show some examples of use.
Regards
Cool. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the mention on Cascada Mobile’s Breeze platform. We’ve been busy since the launch of the development platform and this morning took the covers off of the mobile application portal where we are featuring the creative apps that developers have been building, all free and ready for download. The Breeze App portal is now open to the public at http://www.breezeapps.com, so come on over and check it out. We’re adding new user generated mobile apps daily, and already have some cool apps available for free download; from a mobile friendfeed app and a puzzle slider game, to mobile RSS readers and a mobile Twitter app.
Thanks,
John Chilson
Cascada Mobile