Hello Bonjour is a new tool for localising website content.
At These Days a lot of the websites we build have a Flash or Flex interface with content fed in via XML documents. That makes it really easy to deploy the same website in multiple languages. You just pass in a localised XML file and voila, you’ve got a localised site.
Until now, we have been translating those XML files manually, but we’ve just made a little tool called Hello Bonjour that makes that process easier. The tool generates an interface with a Rich Text Editor for each node in your XML document. It shows the original copy and the translated copy side-by-side for easy comparison. You can customise it for each project with your client’s official font faces and brand colours to make it easy to generate content that fits the styleguide. There’s also a Find and Replace tool so you can quickly update URLs or other text throughout the entire document.
You can test out a demo here. Sharing is caring, so here’s the source code. Feel free to use it or adapt it to meet your needs.
Appcelerator Titanium is an open source mobile application development tool for iPhone and Android which allows you to code apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I tested out the platform this morning. Having developed an iPhone application with Objective C before, I can tell you that Titanium makes the iPhone development process a whole lot easier. Getting the Android SDK working was a bit tricky but development itself is simple. I love being able to compile native applications by writing standard web code!
Here’s an example of just how easy it can be:
Code for a simple Titanium App
The Titanium app in iPhone
The Titanium app in Android
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Getting the Andriod emulator installed correctly can be a real pain. After you have downloaded the Android SDK, open the Android SDK and AVD Manager and make sure you install all of these:
- Android SDK Tools
- SDK Platform Android 1.5, API 3
- Google APIs by Google Inc., Android API 3
In your Titanium Developer profile, set the Android API location to /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86. Also, I found the Android emulator to be frustratingly slow, but I don’t think that’s Titanium’s fault.
To create useful mobile applications I think it would be a good idea to start with the following:
I have included some screenshots of the Kitchen Sink application built in Titanium below so you can get an idea of what can be done.
Slider UI
Entering text input
Saving data on the device
Barriers to mobile app development are getting so low they are almost non-existent. As web developers today we have no excuse not be creating for mobile. We don’t need to wait for Flash CS5. The tools to create rich, responsive mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Nokia are already available with HTML5. If we have to deploy a native app there are open source tools available to convert web standards like HTML and JavaScript into native iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia applications.
There are a number of advantages to developing with HTML5 instead of writing native Objective C applications for iPhone. You have probably already heard these:
- Developing with web technology is much faster than with Objective C,
- Bug fixes and updates can be deployed instantly,
- We can utilize our existing HTML, CSS & JavaScript talent.
But what you might not have realised is:
Of course there are still differences between the various mobile devices, but with a bit of tweaking the same HTML5 app can be made to run on iPhone, Android, Palm and Nokia devices because they all use the Webkit browser engine.
Sometimes we might need to generate native applications, to sell the application in Apple’s App Store for example. But even that doesn’t mean we have to resort to Objective C or Java. There is a clever open source tool called Appcelerator Titanium which deploys native applications to iPhone and Android – and we can code them in standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course deploying as native apps removes some of the benefits inherent to web apps – such as rapid deployment and development iteration. But this approach still dramatically reduces barriers to development. Phone Gap is another open source tool for deploying native mobile applications from standard web technologies. Unlike Appcelerator, Phone Gap supports Blackberry, Palm and Nokia as well as iPhone and Android. However it doesn’t offer as rich of a feature set as Appcelerator. Rhomobile offers yet another framework, but it is targeted towards Ruby developers.
So when you next have an idea for a mobile app, don’t give up on it because you don’t know Objective C or Java, or because it is too difficult to create a cross-platform app. Put your existing HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills to use and take advantage of HTML5 or an open source web-to-native compiler. I will have a play around with Appcelerator and Phone Gap and post my findings on this blog.
Comparison of mobile application development methods
| Native apps |
Web apps |
Native apps compiled from standard web code |
- Fast, best method for games
- Easily monetised
- Slow, separate development process for each platform
|
- Instant deployments of bug fixes and updates
- Can be cross-platform
- Uses web standards
- Avoid the App Store gatekeeper
|
- Easily monetised
- Easily deployed to multiple platforms
- Uses web standards
|
