Public Radio Player 2.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available on iTunes App Store
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Public Radio Player 2.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch. This app is already half way in the top 10 free Music apps on the iTunes App Store. PRP 2.0 was developed by a team assembled by the great minds at Public Radio Exchange (PRX). Bringing this app to life has been possible thanks to the contribution of many stakeholders. My involvement with this project has been primarily as an expert in hybrid development techniques for the iPhone. Hybrid apps are a class of apps developed primarily using web standards (HTML, CSS and Javascript), then wrapped around a native Objective C/Cocoa Touch so that they can be conveniently distributed as binary via iTunes App Store. There are several advantages of following this approach to building iPhone apps:
- Short learning curve: Objective C is not as easy to learn as Javascript
- Faster development time: no need to compile app to test it as Javascript is interpreted
- Tapping into a large pool of talent: there are far more web developers than Objective C ones
- Portability: WebKit, the core engine for Mobile Safari, is also the core engine for other evolved smartphones web browsers such as Android, Palm Pre and Nokia’s Symbian.
WebKit is the fastest web engine on earth. It is also the one with the lightest footprint and, to top it off, it is also open source. In addition, WebKit has full support for
HTML 5, including local client-side persistent storage via
SQLlite, another popular open source technology. Unless an app requires access to fast graphics, as is the case for most videogames, it can be developed as an hybrid app leveraging the powerful features of WebKit and reaping the many benefits of it. Google has already demonstrated a cross-platform version of the popular Gmail web app built with WebKit that works on both Android and iPhone, and works offline because it caches messages in its local SQLite database.
While developers can build hybrid apps completely from scratch, it helps using some of the already available hybrid apps frameworks. The most popular of which at this moment appears to be
PhoneGap. While PhoneGap is definitely a step in the right direction and would be a great fit for apps that are not trying to do too much, more advanced developers should consider
QuickConnect for iPhone as it exposes a greater list of native iPhone SDK objects via Javascript than PhoneGap does, at least at the time of writing this. PRP 2.0 was developed using QuickConnect for iPhone. Lee and the QuickConnect community have been very helpful to get to the finish line. Both frameworks are open source and I find that QuickConnect is very actively developed by its founder Lee Barney, currently a professor at Brigham Young University Idaho, with deep experience as CIO/CTO of a web and mobile software company. Lee Barney’s recently published book on iPhone hybrid apps development, available also at Amazon.com in
paperback and for the
Kindle. I am tracking all iPhone Hybrid Frameworks on my blog at:
http://www.giuseppetaibi.com/iphone-hybrid-frameworks-tracker/
I get a kick listening the audio promos voiced by Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me host Peter Sagal:
Tags: Emerging Technologies · My Posts · android · apple · my iPhone apps
1 response so far ↓
1 John Tynan // Aug 5, 2009 at 5:08 pm
As a fan of public radio, I find this app remarkably interesting… both as a media consumer but also as someone who believes in the mission and potential of public radio! As a developer, I also find this app remarkable as well. Is there a community of developers forming around this app? Is development being distributed among interested and capable parties within public broadcasting? As a former webmaster at an NPR member station (and developer of the NPR SIMILE Timeline) I am hoping to attend pubcamp in DC and would love to get up to speed in developing for this app or contributing in any useful way. Will there be discussion of this application at pubcamp? Hope to keep in touch… John T.
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