Spinnaker Studio Mobile Development» Uncategorized

Vimeo, the popular video web site, recently launched an HTML5 video player as an option to the normal flash-based video player. You can try the player by clicking the “Switch to HTML5 player” link on this page.

This is good news for mobile device users who can’t run flash (e.g. iPhone/iPad) but bad news for Adobe, who must wish sites would hold off of HTML5 adoption until Flash were better supported on mobile devices.

Yet another interesting turn of events in what is becoming quite a battle between Apple and Adobe, the maker of Flash. Apple recently began openly panning Flash to journalists, and also announced that Flash would not be supported on the iPad platform.

Additionally, Google has been de-prioritizing fixes for it’s broken Google Gears browser plug-in for the Mac platform because it would be a better investment to simply support HTML5’s offline data storage functionality. The worst part of this for Adobe is that it actually makes sense — why support a proprietary local storage mechanism when there is a rising open-source standard which accomplishes the same goal in a more scalable manner?

What’s the big picture? We’re seeing a steady move toward a world which combines native apps with rich mobile web implementations. HTML5 is gaining traction. So it’s worth considering carefully if your mobile project is best accomplished using a native app, or via a rich mobile web app.

We’ll be posting an article on how to make this kind of decision next week.

ADDENDUM: Google has now officially announced they will be supporting HTML5 client data storage instead of Gears.

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Who will mind the appstore? Carriers, OEMs, or software platforms?

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:44:59 +0000

Will Apple’s popular iTunes app store get some real competition? It looks that way.

“A group of mobile phone operators launched Monday an alliance to build a single platform for the hugely popular applications that allow users to play games and read news on their handsets.”

Mobile firms unite to offer single apps platform

What will the future bring? There are a few choices:

1) Carriers (e.g. AT&T)
2) Mobile platforms (e.g. Google, RIM and Apple)
3) Device makers (e.g. LG, Motorola, etc)

This will probably depend on how successful the carrier stores are with consumers, the ease-of-development of carrier platforms, and economics (developers will go where the dollars are eventually).

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How to make resizable iPhone buttons

eggsfromussr — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:35:49 +0000

Common problem of making iPhone buttons is stretchable background. Standard iPhone button can either have an image usually centered, or background image, that is stretched. Proportionally stretched background image usually looks bad.

Solution is to use 9 section image, so only center part will stretch, but corners will stay the same.

prepared button image

incorrectly stretched by 2

Here is an article how to prepare stretchable button image:

http://blog.chomperstomp.com/creating-dynamically-re-sizable-buttons-for-iphone-apps/

Button image have to be set up in code by using stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth reference from iPhone SDK

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-12

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Amazon announces Kindle apps – Amazon announced today the opening of the Kindle development program. You can… http://tumblr.com/x36669iyi #
Commentary on comscore's feb 2010 mobile subscriber statistics – Comscore reported February mobile device and… http://tumblr.com/x366agpue #
New blog article about the hot-off-the-presses Comscore mobile subscriber statistics http://bit.ly/a9g209 #
http://spinnaker.tumblr.com/post/373319226/amazon-kindle-developer-program http://bit.ly/9xXqGf #
http://spinnaker.tumblr.com/post/372643025/apple-advertising-network-for-iphone http://bit.ly/b1UJmd #

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