Future killer mobile apps will seamlessly incorporate social and gaming elements into the main function of the app resulting in emotional linkage.

Out of all the various mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry) Android, by far, has the most comprehensive and robust support for development of cloud-based mobile apps. This is clearly evident in Android’s Content Provider, Sync Adopter, and Services frameworks as well as Sqlite.

I highly recommend viewing the i/0 2010 session on the topic.

iPad section of App Store just went live, and it includes iASL, the app I talked about in my previous post.

An app, iASL (American Sign Language Translator),  we have developed for a key customer has been approved to be part of the premier launch of the iPad App Store–going live this Saturday, April 3. Our team has been working around the clock to finish this app in an extremely short amount of time. It feels good to be part of an elite group of early iPad developers.

It is day 3 at the SEPG North America 2010 conference and another eventful day at the Savannah Convention Center. Osellus is here to exhibit our flagship product IRIS Process Author, a web-based process solution that enables organizations to document, tailor, publish and enact their processes.

Over the last two days we have met and talked with a lot of attendees including process improvement leads, friends of our customers, speakers, CMMI consultants and appraisers, and first timers to the conference. Whether they are here to learn, to offer services or to find solutions, everyone I have talked to shares a common sentiment – they are always looking for tools that could make their lives easier!

For instance, many of the organizations developing and improving their processes are still documenting processes the old fashioned way – in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Visio diagrams. In order to share these processes with the developers, appraisers and customers, home grown tools or SharePoint portals are commonly used to store documentations and process metrics in a central location. However, there is no easy way to filter element associations defined in a process (such as activities by roles), which makes it difficult for end users to consume large amount of information contained within the process in order to gain a clear understanding of what is required of them.

Furthermore, modifications and maintanence of these process assets are very cumbersome and require a lot of manual effort to ensure consistency. Process measurement requirements often evolve faster than the home grown tools that generate process reports to support assessment needs and evaluations.

With IRIS Process Author, process developers can

• define every process element in standardized format
• extend process element definition by adding custom attributes without vendor reconfiguration of the tool
• click-and-drop process elements to create your own process flowcharts and diagrams
• map process elements to multiple reference models (e.g., CMMI, ISO, or any proprietary procedures and standards) for compliancy
• publish processes in a consistent format and share them with all levels of users outside of the tool (no licenses required)
• view process information from multiple perspectives - by process diagram, Roles, Work Products, Disciplines and reference models
• Collaborate on process development, collect feedback and suggest improvements in a centralized process portal

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. It has been a great experience to learn from industry leaders and fellow participants on processes improvements and desired tooling support. I look forward to meeting many more at our booth and after the conference.

There is no support for embedded sql data storage in the first release of Windows Phone 7. As iPhone OS 3.x fully supports SQLite, this is where iPhone OS 3.X has an important edge over Windows Phone 7. I have used SQLite and core data (Apple’s object relational model) extensively in my iPhone apps. It’s a very powerful feature allowing sophisticated on-device data models (many-to-many entity relationships and entity inheritance).

But there is some hope as Windows Phone 7 supports C# Linqs (object-relational mapping). My guess is that a future release of the OS will support a version of SQL Compact.

The answer: integrated support for cloud services.

For more than a year, I have been developing iPhone apps. Most of this apps require extensive server functionality. As mobile application market evolve, the game changer will be the cloud-based services aspect of these applications. That’s where Microsoft mobile platform has a significant edge over Apple’s.

I am just starting to dig into Windows Phone 7 development environment, and the deeper I get the more I like what I see. For one, I like using a modern language C#,and  Visual Studio. It’s nice not to worry about memory management, and memory leaks.

My only concern at this point is the performance of the code running on the device. Can Microsoft deliver the close-to-the-metal performance of iPhone’s Objective-C with their implementation C# VM? I’ll find the answer once I port one of my resource intensive iPhone apps to Windows Phone 7 platform.

One of our customers, forwarded me the following CNN article.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/09/ces.apps/index.html

A must read.

For the past 8 years, I have been developing enterprise applications in Java and C#. When I first started developing iPhone apps in Objective-C, I missed the comfort virtual machines (vm) provided me. But, once I completed my first app (with smooth sliding and scrolling views, fancy graphics, and animations) I was happy to give up all vm benefits for the close to the metal nature of  Objective-C. I am so glad I didn’t forget the importance of explicit memory management from my early 90s C programming days.

When you think about it, performance is paramount when it comes to apps running on hardware constrained mobile devices.

Couple of days ago, Omid, our CEO, pointed out an important fact to me: Apps cover not just the traditional application space, they are also the new universal format for content that is both informative and functional.

Considering that the content space is orders of magnitude larger than the application space, it’s no wonder that app market had such an explosive growth in such a short time.

We are just at the beginning of this new phenomenon.