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.

Do you have a app in the iTunes App Store with spaces in its name and can’t seem to make a correct deep link? The format is itunes.com/app/word1word2…wordn. For example, itunes.com/app/smakelijkamsterdam.

My Apple iPhone Developer account expires in 56 days, so I wanted to know what expiration date I should mark in my calendar. Here’s how I calculated it from the Python console:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=56)
datetime.date(2009, 11, 8)

Google says it very succinctly: “HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications.” HTML5 is coming and it has a lot of interesting features, from audio and video support to local storage. Combine this with the fact that web apps are a particularly attractive way to reach many mobile platforms and the WebKit browser found on the iPhone and Android platforms already implements many of the HTML5 standard, and you can see why HTML5 is so attractive for mobile apps.

With the ability of HTML5 web apps to store data locally and have the browser pass along the device’s hardware states, I believe that HTML5 wbe apps can do almost anything you could want an internet-using application to do. The only exception I can think of is high performance 3D graphics, as even great 2D graphics are possible with CSS3 and HTML5′s canvas tag. Already there are nice libraries like RaphaëlJS that work in the iPhone’s Mobile Safari.

With my friends Katie, Paul and Travis I’ve started Appostles. We’re awesome iPhone, Android and Blackberry developers and we want to build your apps. Sound interesting? Then hire us!

I’m very excited to announce that we are putting on an Android Dev Camp on January 8, 2009 in Amsterdam. It should be a lot of fun, so you should definitely come.

Hopefully this will make up for not posting at all about Mobile Dev Camp, an awesome event I organized in Amsterdam at the end of November. There’s a huge amount of interest in mobile development, so I hope to do more Mobile Dev Camps, both in Amsterdam and in other cities, such as Helsinki. If you’re interested in helping organize them, please drop me a line at peter@bubblefoundry.com.

This Friday sees Lunch 2.0 visiting Utrecht for the first time, where will be hosted by iDiDiD. On August 22 we have a Lunch 2.0 at Sogeti in Diemen. Finally at the end of the month, I am hosting an iPhone Dev Camp on August 30 at my office. We’ve had a huge response to the Dev Camp idea, so if anyone has any routers, tables, chairs, projectors or other gear they’d be willing to lend me for the day, it’d be much appreciated!

Finally, keep November 22 open in your calendars. Together with Joris Machielse, I am organizing a BarCamp-style event around creating startups. More information to come in early September, but if you have any people you’d like to meet or things you wished you knew before you started your business, please leave a comment below or email me at peter@bubblefoundry.com.