Mobile GIS & LBS Posts Tagged ‘PhoneGap’The Democratization of GISThursday, February 19th, 2015
Henry Ford famously wrote in the early 1900’s: “I’m going to democratize the automobile, and when I’m through, everybody will have one.” It was a bold statement. And though Ford did not invent the automobile, he was one of the pioneers of mass production providing low cost, reliable automobiles. Similar to the automobile 100 years ago, are we now at the explosive growth phase of GIS? Web versus Installed Mobile Apps in ArcGIS OnlineThursday, January 17th, 2013
Wanted to follow up on a recent post we wrote on hosted Web apps for ArcGIS Online.
As we pointed out in the article these new Javascript web app templates are terrific. They are integrated into ArcGIS Online, and allow for the building of targeted Web apps, for multiple use (GIS and non-GIS). Further, once built, these apps can be configured by ArcGIS Online admins without the need for a developer. Mobile templates are also in the works. Now these are web apps, so online browser based applications. What if we need an installed mobile application? Building Mobile GIS Apps using TitaniumTuesday, May 22nd, 2012
GeoSpatial Mobile Development: Flex or HTML5?Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
“JavaScript not Flex/Silverlight — Yeah, it isn’t much of a surprise, open source users aren’t big Flex or Silverlight users, but JavaScript HTML5 web apps are everywhere and doing everything Flex/Silverlight can do, but work everywhere …. At this point it is safe to call every Flex/Silverlight location app as legacy as nobody in their right mind would be coding with those tools in 2012.” and this on the Slideshare Blog: “Ditching Flash for HTML5 feels like the right choice for us for a number of engineering reasons. 1. The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers. This is great from an operations perspective. This saves us from extra storage costs, and maximizes the cache hit ration on our CDN (since a desktop request fills the cache for a mobile request, and vice-versa). It’s also great from a software engineering perspective, because we can put all our energy into supporting one format and making it really great. 2. Documents load 30% faster and are 40% smaller. ‘Nuff said on that front, faster is ALWAYS better. 3. The documents are semantic and accessible. Google can parse it and index the documents, and so can any other bot, scraper, spider, or screen-reader. This means that you can write code that does interesting things with the text on the slideshare pages. You can even copy and paste text from a SlideShare document, something that was always a pain with Flash.” These types of discussions have been going on since the dawn of the Web. New technologies replacing old. The advent of mobile certainly presents new challenges, and may well alter the landscape. But the end of Flash or Flex has been called wrongly so many times. Adobe are an innovative company. There are ever more developers moving over to learn and use their Flex and Air products. And frankly, as somebody who has worked with these technologies since their inception, they are just fantastic for building the next generation of Web and mobile apps. But will the decision by both Apple and now Windows, to not allow plug-ins on their mobile browsers end Flex as we know it? Remember Flex needs the Flash plug-in installed to run in any Web browser. At the moment Flex development continues strongly on the the PC based Web, where the Apple and Windows restrictions do not apply. HTML5 development continues in parallel. But, as many of us continue to believe, if mobile devices do take over from the PC, the mobile Web may well be all about HTML5. Adobe Air started out life named Apollo. When it was launched, many in the development community could see the thinking behind the release, but never a good place to build Air apps in the PC world. That has all now changed. Air is an installed application, not relying on any browser plug-ins. Mobile Air offers the only cross platform mobile (installed) solution on the market today. No more building mobile apps in 3 different languages or more for each mobile platform. One code base runs on Apple IOS, Android and Blackberry. No need for third party conversions as provided by the likes of PhoneGap for HTML5. Adobe mobile Air apps are both fast and able to interact directly with native code. Adobe Air and Flex are nearly identical. So looking forward, if Flex becomes less popular due to business decisions made by Apple and Windows; Adobe Air is about to see enormous growth. So maybe there is some truth in those who say its the end of Flex. But its just the beginning of Adobe mobile Air! GeoSpatial Mobile DevelopersThursday, September 22nd, 2011
Is geo-spatial or location based mobile application development just a niche? Maybe most application development companies are focused on general mobile app development? Perhaps its because mobile is so new, that both clients and software development companies are still trying to fit mobile into their overall plan. Mobile Location ServicesThe mobile location sector is very fragmented at the moment. On one side we have ESRI, the worlds biggest GIS company. They were slow in entering the Web, they are moving quicker with mobile, but their world remains GIS focused. And that is a niche no doubt. They have yet to broaden their appeal beyond their core, mostly public, GIS community.
Figure 1: ESRI ArcGIS running on the IPad The location based sector is more dynamic. Its somewhat a bubble at the minute, with tonnes of VC money pouring into some frankly daft ideas. But there are some gems within that world. Like the dot com boom and bust, many will fall but some real innovation will come from this sector. There are huge opportunities to build location based applications, classed as location based services (LBS), to use in marketing, advertising and beyond on mobile devices. At present this sector is narrowly focused on consumers. Broadening solutions to the enterprise offers mouth watering possibilities. Figure 2 below shows a mobile check-in and data collection application which allows field service techs, surveyors, water utility workers, indeed any workers in the field to utilize mobile in their daily work routines. MapQuest have an interesting offering. They were one of the the earliest companies to put maps on the Web. Initially focused on routing/directions, and traffic, they have broadened their offering to to include local search, marker and map overlays. In October they announce their Flash mobile API release. This is a big deal. More about Flash in a minute. But the MapQuest offering is in many ways made for mobile. Imagine being able to access routing and up to date traffic information while on the road. Look ahead and see accidents on your route and avoid them. Conduct local searches; find venues near you. Overlay KML and GeoRSS markers on the map to see points of interest (POI). Tonnes of possibilities.
Figure 2: MapQuest Enterprise Check-In and Data Collection App Location Based Cross Platform Mobile DevelopmentObjective C has become one of the most in demand programming languages. This relates to the popularity of Apple mobile devices. Most of the apps in the Apple App Store are written in Objective C. Successful mobile application development shops are filled with Objective C developers. But the game is changing. Android, and other mobile platforms are becoming increasingly more popular. Where does that leave your beautiful Objective C application? Only running on Apple products that’s where! You’ll need to rewrite it for Android, BlackBerry, Windows! Now, thankfully there are cross platform solutions. Two of the most notable are Adobe AIR and PhoneGap. With AIR you can take your existing Flex or Flash apps and convert it to a mobile applications. Or build your AIR mobile app from scratch. But, most importantly, run the app on all mobile platforms. With PhoneGap take your Javascript application and do the same. That is one code base, which runs across mobile platforms. Simple. Geo-Spatial Cross Platform Mobile DevelopmentWe have digressed slightly from our original topic. The future of mobile is very interesting, and filled with opportunities. Location will be at the core of many, if not most mobile applications. One day it might be pointless for companies such as us to target location based cross platform application development. But at the minute it seems to make tonnes of sense. Mobiles devices are computers with ever changing locations. Taking advantage of location to provide dynamic data – traffic ahead, what or who is near me, analysis by current location – has endless possibilities. Cross platform too. Who has the money or time to build multiple versions of the same application to run across each mobile platform? Build it once and deploy it to all would seem to be the future. We might be wrong. But we are going to stay focused on cross platform location based mobile application solutions. |
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