I watched part of the Adobe MAX presentation yesterday in which Adobe said that they are acquiring Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap. PhoneGap is essentially a competitor to Titanium. Not a complete competitor, but read on. This development is likely the harbinger of changing the game entirely. Here’s why.
Further reading: Ars Technica | Adobe Acquires Nitobi
Adobe Flash lost as a web application development standard, and Adobe knows it. They are spending tons of cash right now in a game of catch-up and expect to be the leader in web development again (they were just a short 5 years ago). After their initial, bitter battle with Apple and running Flash apps on iOS, they turned things around and you can now use Adobe tools to deploy apps on iOS. They already released a beta of a complete IDE for building HTML5/JavaScript5/CSS3 applications. It’s called Adobe Edge.
With the power and capabilities of Edge growing with every release (because their customers are demanding it) it is most likely that PhoneGap will be tightly integrated as the de facto framework for building applications in the tool. Much like when Appcelerator purchased the Aptana IDE and converted it into Titanium Studio which allows us to code, build and deploy applications from one tool, Adobe Edge will be a complete IDE for HTML/JS/CSS application development.
Further reading: CNET | Adobe Sharpens Edge
Now, if you are building desktop apps, PhoneGap is not an option because it is exclusively mobile. It’s the main reason that Titanium Desktop became so successful. Unfortunately, Titanium Desktop seems to be an abandoned, or at least orphaned, child in the Appcelerator roadmap. The few Appcelerator employees that I talked to at the conference two weeks ago did not have any answers as to how their desktop product fit into their future plans. They are currently focused 100% on their mobile application development tools. This is most likely because Appcelerator is resource strapped and simply giving all of its focus to what customers are demanding RIGHT NOW.
Adobe has no such limitations. Their AIR Runtime already allows developers to build HTML/JavaScript applications that can run on any desktop OS. Unfortunately, it could not run on every mobile OS, so it will most likely be abandoned and replaced with the eventual PhoneGap successor for mobile apps. I don’t see Adobe abandoning the desktop because they already have a dedicated presence there, and with the (finally) released information about the Microsoft Windows WinRT API in which you can author complete applications with JavaScript, it plays right into the hands of Adobe.
It’s highly probable that Adobe Edge has AIR integration for desktop applications before the official 1.0 release.
So what this gives us is more than one option for every environment. The source code for the GUI would continue to be in one language, but then could be built, or interpreted, to any platform. It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with the PhoneGap platform in the next year.
JavaScript
I find it interesting when I talk to developers who are focused on Java and .NET platforms about how JavaScript will soon replace a huge chunk of what they currently have to do when making applications with a user interface. I would think it would be a source of jubilation – no more worrying about cross-platform UI issues in compiled code – but I find there’s still a lot of resistance and denial even though the facts are all right in front of us.
This next generation of application development is going to be fun, not only because we can reduce the amount of code we need to write, but also because the entire industry is moving away from the immobile desktop and towards the mobile device platform.
This is somewhat obscure as most people using Titanium are using it for mobile apps, but I’ve seen just enough questions out there about this, that I thought I’d share the code that we came up with to allow users to drag a Titanium Desktop window when the background has been set to transparent and is chromeless.
This is a modification to the code found at a blog called Code Bytes. Unfortunately, I can’t credit the developer by name because nowhere on the blog does he/she actually provide a name or bio.
This was developed for version 1.1 of the Titanium framework. If you are using a later version, this may have been fixed.
/*
* This code augments the Titanium framework code by detecting any element that has the
* 'isDraggable' class assigned to it. If that element is dragged, the entire window
* is dragged correspondingly. Also, only works on left-mouse click.
*/
var isDraggableWindow = function() {
this.addEventListener('mousedown', function (e){
function drag(e) {
var currentWindow = Titanium.UI.currentWindow;
var currentPosition = {x:currentWindow.getX(), y:currentWindow.getY()};
currentPosition.x += e.clientX - mousePosition.x;
currentPosition.y += e.clientY - mousePosition.y;
currentWindow.moveTo(currentPosition.x, currentPosition.y);
};
if (e.button === 0 && ~e.target.className.indexOf('isDraggable')) {
var mousePosition = {x:event.clientX, y:event.clientY};
document.addEventListener('mousemove', drag, false);
document.addEventListener('mouseup', function (e){
document.removeEventListener('mousemove', drag, false);
document.removeEventListener('mouseup', arguments.callee, false);
}, false);
}
}, false);
};
// Then in your main module/application, you simply pass the ID of the top-level element
isDraggableWindow.call(document.getElementById('topLevelHTMLElementInApp'));
We added the following restrictions to the original code.
On October 5th, Brian Cavalier will be presenting his work on Asynchronous Module Definition API and CommonJS modules. It will be a very interesting presentation and should generate some great conversation.
Event Link: AMD and CommonJS modules
On October 11th, we’ll be covering Appcelerator’s Titanium framework which is an open-source framework that allows you write an application in JavaScript and then build native apps for iOS and Android (and Blackberry soon). You can also deploy the application to the desktop – whether it be Windows, OSX or Linux. One source code library to deploy to 6 platforms!
Event Link: Appcelerator Titanium Framework
On October 25th, we’ll be discussing how to build a JavaScript application and deploy it in the Adobe AIR runtime. With Adobe AIR, JavaScript developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.
Event Link: JavaScript and the Adobe AIR runtime
For some reason, Sencha decided to NOT make every single component in their architecture raise a click event. I don’t comprehend this, but I’m sure they had good reasons – possibly performance, possibly scalability.
Whatever the reason, if you want to make anything clickable, it’s very simple. Simply add the following listener.
id : 'myLabel',
xtype : 'label',
html : '<div class="myHelpLabel"></div>',
listeners : {
render : function(c) {
c.getEl().on('click', function(){ this.fireEvent('click'); }, c);
}
}
Poof. Now you can detect when that element is clicked in your controller (if you’re using the Sencha MVC architecture).
init: function(){
this.control({
'sampleView #myHelpLabel' : {
click : function(c) {
// Do something brilliant
}
},
...
I found it… what’s the right word… puzzling when I worked at DaVita how I was approached on several occasions to remove, or alter information I had put on my blog about DaVita. It was nothing that exposed trade secrets, competitive advantages, or strategic initiatives. One time, it was simply the fact that I had the word DaVita in the blog post that somehow triggered a red flag, and I was instructed to redact it.
Now that I no longer work at DaVita and for Smith Micro, the company, while it doesn’t embrace social media, certainly isn’t completely ignorant of its power and possibilities. In a recent issue of Harvard Business Review, I very much enjoyed reading an article with interviews from senior people at large companies discussing how they are handling the social media beast.
Yes, all of them mentioned how security and leaking is an issue, but the companies who made online expression part of their corporate culture – rather than blocking all possible access by every employee – found that their teams went out of their way to responsibly share information when communicating online.
DaVita was a great company at managing, nurturing and supporting the local social interactions of people all across the company, but seemed clueless when it came to the online extension of those relationships.
I wonder how many companies out there are truly making an effort to embrace the future rather than sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that the change isn’t happening. Of course, there are some organization that simply cannot risk their teams having the ability to share information online while they are work – I understand that. However, it also appears that some companies hide behind this visage of “oh we’re working on far too important stuff to risk some stupid employee telling everyone about it” when they manufacture paper clips, or build medical devices, when the truth is that they simply don’t understand how to manage it.
Fear and ignorance are powerful motivators.