Mobile apps are shiny, new and still exciting for users and developers. As it turns out, designers can easily tap into all of this.
Somehow, over the past month or so I’ve dived fully into Android app development. I’m a print designer normally. I focus on magazines and occassional collateral. I’ve done some infographic design which felt like a natural extension of print. Sure, I was part of the web page club in high school. A few years ago, I knew table based web design. Then I moved to learning css. This time, I thought I’d study some Javascript. When I learned that Phonegap could package a website on to Android phones as apps, it seemed like a great way to learn Javascript. Give myself a simple task of making an app and learn from there.
From Google’s documentation: “There are essentially two ways to deliver an application on Android: as a client-side application (developed using the Android SDK and installed on user devices as an .apk) or as a web application (developed using web standards and accessed through a web browser—there’s nothing to install on user devices).”
Phonegap (Apache Cordova)
Phonegap, soon to be renamed Apache Cordova, is an open-source mobile development framework developed by Adobe Systems. It allows web based development with all of it’s visual and technical advantages and disadvantages. It also allows you to access native featurs such as the camera, gps and accelerometer.
In theory, you can develop cross platform apps with a single codebase. “Build your app once with web-standardsBased on HTML5, PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript. Wrap it with PhoneGap using the free open source framework or PhoneGap build you can get access to native APIs. Deploy to multiple platforms! PhoneGap uses standards-based web technologies to bridge web applications and mobile devices.” I haven’t fully tested this, but reports are that the differences in various browsers quickly can come into play.
Be sure to try out one of my trivia apps in the Android Market. Let me know what you think I can improve.
Brian E. Young is a graphic designer and artist in Baltimore, MD.