If you have visited this site before you might have noticed that things are looking a little bit different around here. There is a new look and also the software that the site runs on has been upgraded. Since the site started it has run on an installation of Drupal 5, which is of course part of history now and no longer supported. It was great to get three and a half years service out of that version of Drupal but the time had come to move on and upgrade to Drupal 7 in order that the site will have the features it needs going forward. Upgrading was an interesting experience though and maybe a little time consuming!
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Just targeting one mobile platform is not good enough anymore but building apps for lots of different mobile phone platforms could be a long and tedious task. Every smartphone platform has its own software development kit (SDK), these will need a developer to use different languages to be able to work with them all. You could easily end up with five or six code bases in order to reach a decent number of devices. So what to do if a mobile web site isn't seen as an acceptable alternative? Fortunately mobile apps and mobile web sites are two ends of a spectrum of possibilities. Sitting somewhere in the middle is PhoneGap Build, a service that lets you develop using Javascript, HTML and CSS and then builds apps for five platforms in the cloud.
Samsung Internet@TV is a platform that aims to bring content from the Internet into people's living rooms through certain Samsung televisions and Blu-ray players (be careful to check app availability though). The system uses HTML “widgets” to bring an app like experience to the TV set. For developers this is a chance to experience developing for an embedded system while needing only HTML, CSS and Javascript skills. As another bonus Samsung are currently running a competition for developers in Europe (at the time of writing there is about one month left until closing) where you can win some decent prizes. In this post I will attempt to pull together some information on how to build a simple “Hello World” app and then deploy it to a real Internet@TV device for testing.