Getting To Know Sidney Maestre
If you think you can’t develop worthwhile iPhone apps around Adobe technology, think again. Sidney Maestre, founder of Crush It Mobile, has done just that with the great iPhone app he put together to assist NCDevCon2010 attendees. If you have been wanting to give iPhone application development a try, read on, as Sid has just been selected to present a 90 minute BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) lab in October at Adobe MAX 2010. The session is entitledBuilding Mobile Applications with jQuery.
Accoring to Sid, “the NCDevCon iPhone app is an HTML/CSS/Javascript app built with jQTouch and packaged for the the App Store with PhoneGap. The back-end is powered by ColdFusion 9 and built with the new ORM and CFScript features.” Shiny!
I believe the pre-release of this application probably gaveNCDevCon2010 an edge in terms of exposure. I know when I saw news of its release, I considered that you don’t often see an iPhone app created for just any 3-day affair. The app was free, so I installed it and learned a lot about the conference just by playing around with it. It showed me sessions listed in schedule format as well as by speaker. It provided a Google map of the North Carolina State University campus and surrounding areas. Also included, among other things, was an on-screenNCDevCon Twitter stream. I made good use of this application all throughout the conference.
Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to Sid about his iPhone application development adventures. I learned that Sid developed his first iPhone app as a means for learning jQuery using the jQTouch mobile web development plugin. The jQTouch plugin provides animations, navigation, tracks the user history, and includes two iPhone themes to get your started.That first app, not yet launched, is an attendance tracker that sounds mighty useful for things such as classrooms, sporting events, and meetings. The NCDevCon application is built on a conference engine that is portable to other conferences for customization. Sid reported no issues with regard to submitting the NCDevCon app to the App Store.If this sounds like something you can use for an upcoming event, head over to Crush It Mobile for more information on how Sid can help you create a very complementary mobile application. In fact, he’s just announced a Beta program! “We are looking for a few good conferencesto help us improve our mobile app platform.”
Sid has been designing and developing with ColdFusion since 1998. His passion for cutting edge technology led him into RIA and now mobile development. After 12 years of running his consulting business, design over matter, Sid has decided to make the leap into full time mobile application development. This decision is marked with the launching of his new business, Crush It Mobile. Congratulations to Sid! Sid also manages the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group in San Francisco, CA. To contact Sid, visit his website at http://www.crushitmobile.com.You can also find Sid on Twitter @SidneyAllen or check out his blog.
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Comments on: "iPhone Development Happens" (5)
Any chance of releasing the client side source? I am interested in seeing how the bottom menu was built.
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Looks very cool. I have only played around with jQTouch a bit, but it seems very easy to configure and hit the ground running. I had a few issues when I wanted to alter the way the page-to-page navigation was working (since it relied on triggering special touch events); but, definitely a very cool framework.
Plus, the skins are pretty awesome 🙂
I’m definitely dying to get into more of this mobile / HTML5-style web application stuff.
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@Dan
The toolbar is fixed at the bottom and the center well is scrollable.
I used the jqt.scrolling extension found at https://code.google.com/p/jqextensions/
Here is a link to how it works.
https://code.google.com/p/jqextensions/wiki/HowItWorks
One note, you’ll need to test scrolling in Mobile Safari. It uses touch events which don’t occur in the desktop version of Safari.
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What about android phones? I know both browsers are based on Webkit, but did you test this on any android devices? If so how did it look?
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Hey Dan,
Just saw your post. I did port the NCDevCon app to the Android Simulator and it looked pretty good. The only problem with a feedback textarea that sat under the fixed toolbar. When I clicked the toolbar it launched the keyborard to input the text area. So… some tweaking will be needed.
Congrats on the CFUnited mobile app. I think you said you used Sencha for that. I’m going to investigate that platform next.
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