The
mobile application development landscape is filled with many ways to build a
mobile app. Among the most popular are:
 |
| Four Ways To Build A Mobile Application, Part 1: Native iOS |
- native iOS,
- native Android,
- PhoneGap,
- Appcelerator Titanium.
This
article marks the start of a series of four articles covering the technologies
above. The series will provide an overview of how to build a simple mobile
application using each of these four approaches. Because few developers have had
the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, this series is
intended to broaden your scope.
Hopefully,
armed with this knowledge, you will be in a better position to choose the right
development tools for your mobile application’s needs. In this first article in
the series, we’ll
start with some background and then dig into iOS.
I’ve
built the same simple application with each technology to demonstrate the basic
concepts of development and the differences between the platforms and
development tools. The purpose of this series is not to convert you to a
particular technology, but rather to provide some insight into how applications
are created with these various tools, highlighting some of the common terms and
concepts in each environment.
FasTip
is a simple application to calculate tips. Because this is a simple example, it
uses the standard UI controls of each platform:
The
screenshots above show the application running as native
iOS, PhoneGapand native
Android applications.
Appcelerator Titanium uses native controls, so it looks the same as the native
iOS and Android applications. Our application has two screens: a main screen
where the tips are calculated, and a settings screen that enables the user to
set a tip percentage. To keep things simple and straightforward, we’ll use the
default styles of each environment.
The
source code for each app is available
on GitHub.
