Posts Tagged ‘Drag And Drop’

If Only BlackBerry Developer Tools Looked Like Google’s App Inventor

July 13th, 2010 BBerryNews


YouTube Link

Today, Google unveiled a new tool in Google Labs called App Inventor that allows just about anyone to create an app for Android. We’ve heard rumors that RIM will be launching new developer tools with a drag and drop style interface, and we can only hope that the tools are as easy and awesome as App Inventor.

App Inventor has been in closed beta and today they are opening it to the general public. For the past year, Google has been taking App Inventor around classrooms in the US, and they have found that it has also become a powerful tool for promoting computer science and programming. Once case involves a student with dyslexia who was inspired by App Inventor to take more computer science classes and is now learning Python.

The beauty of App Inventor is that you don’t need to know how to program to be an Android developer. This will open the market to thousands, and possibly millions of applications. The platform uses a visual system of blocks to specify the app’s behavior. The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages.

The compiler that translates the visual blocks language for implementation on Android uses the Kawa Language Framework and Kawa’s dialect of the Scheme programming language, developed by Per Bothner and distributed as part of the Gnu Operating System by the Free Software Foundation.

With development tools being one of the largest barriers to entry for BlackBerry apps, something similar to App Inventor would really give App World a huge boom in applications.

If you happen to have both an Android device and a BlackBerry, you should definitely try it out. Just fill out this form to get an invite.

Head over to the App Inventor site to see what people are cooking up.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2010



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Quickly Develop and Deploy Enterprise Applications with Seregon MAP

March 18th, 2010 BBerryNews

Seregon let us know that they have released version 3.1 of their Mobile Application Platform (MAP). MAP allows you to build enterprise applications in a timely manner, by taking advantage of their MAP Design Studio for importing databases, web services and building drag and drop GUIs. Once the application is complete, Seregon allows you to deploy OTA to a variety of devices.

Seregon’s solution includes a native “thick client” which is installed on the BlackBerry, where it automatically configures to each BlackBerry OS & screen size / resolution. This architecture allows the user to work offline, integrate with device hardware, and limit airtime and data usage. Devices connect to back-end systems through their MAP DataServer, which acts as a synchronization engine. MAP also incorporates the LUA scripting language for developers that want to write code within MAP.

For more information about Seregon, you check them out at Seregon.com or on Twitter with @SeregonMAP.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2010



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RIM announces End of Life for BlackBerry MDS Runtime and Studio

August 14th, 2009 BBerryNews

bb_mds_arch_large

BlackBerry MDS (Mobile Data System) is a development framework for BlackBerry that allows developers to use Visual Studio as a platform and use what RIM calls a RAD (rapid application development) method. The RAD development method involves a drag and drop interface where you can then create the code behind your forms to do the work.

This news comes after RIM announced new plug-ins for Eclipse and Visual Studio. It seems that RIM is focusing on the Java and web development platforms so platforms such as MDS are all getting canceled.

As of December 31st,2009, both BlackBerry MDS Runtime and Studio will no longer be available. Runtime and Studio will lose support as of June 30th, 2010.

[Thanks for the tip J.M.]

UPDATE: Official notice from RIM.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009



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