Bubble Foundry

Recently I’ve been working with Arjan on a Cordova (PhoneGap) app for AT5, the local TV station in Amsterdam. While HTML5 video tags work just fine in the app, playing a video kicks you out of the app and into Mobile Safari. Since that’s not the nicest user experience, we wanted to add a native video player plugin to play the videos within the app.

phonegap-videoplayer-plugin is commonly used to do just this, but it doesn’t work in recent versions of Cordova nor is installation totally obvious. So, I took only the most essential files from it and created my own native plugin, CDVVideo. You can find CDVVideo on GitHub.

I have taken over the reigns of CocoaHeads NL from Cathy Shive and the first event of the relaunched group will be this coming Tuesday, 16 August 2011, at 19:00 at de Waag. Daniel Salber and I will presenting an accelerated version of the mobile APIs talk we gave a few weeks go at the Appsterdam Lunchtime Lectures. More information can be found on the CocoaHeads site. Hope to see you there!

Daniel Salber and I will be giving the next Appsterdam Weekly Wednesday Lecture on mobile APIs. The talk is on Wednesday July 27 at 12:30 at Vijzelstraat 20, Amsterdam.

Here is our talk description:

Many mobile apps get data or send data to a server. What are the issues in implementing this kind of apps? In this talk, Peter Robinett and Daniel Salber will share their personal experiences designing and implementing both the server and client (iOS) sides of APIs for mobile apps, taking examples from their apps Smakelijk Amsterdam, Coffeeshoppr, iFebo, and JHM. Starting from questions to ask at the beginning of a project, continuing all the way through to debugging and performance, they will lead you through a broad overview of the implementation of a mobile API in your project.