What I Did Over the Summer Past Year and a Half

In late 2010 my partner and I founded Mobile Developer Solutions to create free software tools for web developers who want to write mobile web apps. AppLaud, our Eclipse plugin for Android, bundles PhoneGap technology with an easy-to-use project creation wizard, allowing users create and deploy a complete PhoneGap for Android app with just a few clicks. The AppLaud plugin includes a few goodies like JSLint, jQuery Mobile, a choice of PhoneGap versions and project templates.

While Paul did the heavy lifting: designing and developing AppLaud (in Java), I created the Two-Minute Tutorials (TMT) series (HTML / JavaScript / CSS) to help developers rapidly ramp up their mobile device skills. The TMTs get increasingly advanced, starting with a basic PhoneGap API, then using a jQuery Google Maps Plugin, a PhoneGap Native Plugin: the popular BarcodeScanner, and finally OAuth and the social media plugins: Twitter and Facebook.

The best part: it’s all free under the MIT License! (copy, modify, sell, etc) My work is available in all the usual places:

• Getting started and demo videos on YouTube
• TMTs - written tutorials with source code
• Source code on github
• Free demo apps on Google play

Next blog: Good-bye to AppLaud Cloud version!

Socialize your PhoneGap App with Facebook and Twitter!

With the enormous popularity of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no wonder people want to make mobile web apps that incorporate a social aspect. Whatever awesome things your app surely does, imagine letting users tweet about it with just a few taps, from within your app!

My latest tutorial shows how to add Facebook to your PhoneGap App on Android using the Facebook SDK and PhoneGap Connect Plugin. The Hackbook for Android app is the app contents, so examples of SSO, API calls and the Social Graph are already there. Makes it easy to use and learn.

I've already written a tutorial that shows how to add Twitter to your mobile app using the Child Browser plugin. After the user logs in with their Twitter credentials (from your app) the app can access their account. Let your app users tweet, search, read, or whatever cool way you come up with to socialize your app with Twitter services.

Next blog: More on AppLaud Eclipse Plugin for PhoneGap on Android. Get started writing PhoneGap Apps with just a few clicks.