The popularity of mobile applications is on a perpetual flux of advancing and expanding, as their usage has become increasingly prevalent across mobile phone users. The mobile app explosion has incited a rapid expansion into other sectors, such as factory automation, GPS andlocation-based services, banking, order-tracking, and ticket purchases have made app development more of a challenge; which in turn has led to the creation of a wide range of reviews, recommendations, and curation sources, including blogs, magazines, and dedicated online app-discovery services.
Popular Apps On The Market
One of the most popular is Apple’s App Store, where only approved applications may be distributed and run on iOS devices ( otherwise known as a walled garden). Since June of 2012 there were around 700,000 iOS Applications available. With extraordinary speed Google’s Android Market ( now known as the “Play Store” ) counting seems to come in at 2nd place containing one of the largest number of apps which are running on Android OS devices.
Most recently, several mobile operators such as the Telefonica Group and Telecom Italia have launched cross-platform application stores for their mobile subscribers. Additionally, mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia have launched the Ovi app store for Nokia smartphones. The Windows Phone Marketplace is the fastest growing application store in history, with more than 100,000+ apps (including Xbox games) available as of 7-11-2012.
Mobile Apps For Blogging
Additionally if you are blogging with WordPress then these applications make it even better by giving you more ways within posting your content. Whether you are blogging from your desktop or on the go, then check out these additional options which will enable you to post to your WordPress blog.
Below we have gathered some of the best Mobile Apps and Tools for your development tasks which will enable you to expedite your app ideas into actual mobile-friendly apps. We hope some of these will be well suited to your needs. Enjoy !
1. Ratchet : iPhone App Prototyping with HTML-CSS-JS
Ratchet is an open source toolkit for easily prototyping iPhone apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). It has lots of iOS-looking components like buttons, forms, bars, lists, toggles, sliders, etc. that can be inserted to the prototypes with few lines of code. The download package is just the template files and the components library. Creating layouts is very easy and their look can be customized with CSS.
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2. Nimbuskit : iOS Framework with Several Components
NimbusKit is an open source iOS framework, mostly for experienced developers, that consists of various components. The components are all modular, well-documented and aim to fill frequently-used but missing features. Some of the components are: rich text label with hyperlinks, web view controller; an approach to table models, radio groups, table actions and more. NimbusKit is developed + contributed by an active community and releases new features/updates frequently.
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3. Swipeview : Infinite Carousels for Mobile Web
SwipeView is a simple-yet-effective JavaScript library for creating infinite (looping) carousels. The carousel is built for the mobile browsers and has multiple advantages for the mobile platform. It is standalone, only works for horizontal sliders, can be used for any HTML content and, as expected, there is touch support.
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4. jqmPhp : HTML Code Generator for jQuery Mobile
jqmPhp is an open source project that aims to simplify using jQuery Mobile with PHP. It is a pack of PHP classes that can generate the HTML outputs which jQuery Mobile is expecting within few lines. The classes are on separate files (with names parallel to the JQM’s features) so you can choose to only use the necessary ones. It covers almost all the features of the framework, it is very well-documented and supported with example.
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5. ViniSketch Designer : Free Tool for Building Mobile Apps
ViniSketch Designer is a free software for visually creating mobile applications using web and native technologies. It only works with Mac OS X and provides visual editors for designing the GUI + dataflow besides a code editor to customize the stuff in detail. There is a built-in simulator and debugger which is based on the WebKit’s WebInspector. The apps created are compatible with iOS + Android and other platforms are under development.
[zilla_button url=”http://www.vinisketch.fr/mainSite/en.html” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
6. Enyo : A JavaScript Framework for Desktop & Mobile
Enyo, the JavaScript framework which was created to power the apps on HP’s TouchPad, has recently reached v2 and now offers cross-platform compatibility rather than only webOS (as v1 did). The new Enyo supports both desktop + mobile, works in all major browsers and comes with a broad set of cross-platform UI widgets + a powerful layout library for building apps.
[zilla_button url=”http://enyojs.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
7. Countly : Open Source Mobile Analytics App
Countly is a modern, real-time and open source mobile analytics application which can collect data from mobile phones and visualize that info for analyzing mobile app usage + end-user behavior.
It is formed of 3 parts: the Countly server + frontend, iOS SDK and Android SDK. With an event-driven system, almost every action can be tracked including in-app purchases, when a user closes the app, ad-click behavior, etc. All these details are displayed in the slick interface of Countly. And, you are not limited to racking a single app. The same interface enables adding any number of apps.
[zilla_button url=”http://count.ly/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
8. Moobile : Mobile App Framework for MooTools
Moobile is an exciting and fresh project; a mobile web application framework built on MooTools. Currently, it is focused on providing a iOS-like experience on WebKit browsers and comes with many controls like bar, button, image, list, activity indicator, slider and more. It also has support for transitions like fade, slide, cubic or cover and can display native-like alerts. Interfaces created with Moobile are fluid, they will work well both in iPhone + iPad and look good when orientation changes.
[zilla_button url=”http://moobilejs.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
9. Mobjectify : Quickly Build Mobile Web Mockups
Mobjectify is a free web application which makes it so much simpler by offering an awesome web-based mockup builder. The application enables us to create pages and add various web elements(like forms, buttons, content areas, footers, etc.) with few clicks. It also offers multiple themes to choose from or you can create new themes. There is a live preview and results can be exported as a single HTML file anytime. Mobjectify powers the mobile web pages with jQuery Mobile + its theme engine and only leaves the custom coding to you.
[zilla_button url=”http://www.mobjectify.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
10. iWebInspector : Web Debugging Tool for iOS Simulator
iWebInspector is a free tool for debugging, profiling and inspecting web applications that run on iOS Simulator (iPhone or iPad). The tool simply attaches the Web Inspector to any tab opened in Safari for iOS, to a chrome-less web app (full screen) or to a PhoneGap application. It enables us to see and browse every element on your HTML element. You can change attributes, content and styles and see how they apply on Safari and see all the resources involved in this page, including Databases, Local Storage, Cookies and ApplicationCache.
[zilla_button url=”http://www.iwebinspector.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
11. MobileESP : Detect Mobile Devices Easily
MobileESP is an open source project for easily detecting users browsing the web pages with a mobile browser. It has server-side versions for PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Ruby and a client-side JavaScript version with light features. There are methods provided for detecting a specific device (iPhone, Android, WebOS, etc.) or a wider selection if it is a smartphone, tablet, game console, etc.
[zilla_button url=”http://blog.mobileesp.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
12. Ripple : Multi Platform Mobile Environment Emulator
Ripple is a multi-platform mobile environment emulator which comes as a Chrome extension and aims to ease this process. It enables us to choose the platform (mobile web, PhoneGap, WebWorks, WAC, etc.) + the device(s) supporting the platform and can display how a given URL would look like with such a combination. The extension allows the use of existing tools to perform JavaScript debugging, HTML DOM inspection, automated testing, as well as multiple device and screen resolution emulation in real-time.
[zilla_button url=”http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
13. Easy APNS : Apple Push Notifications with PHP & MySQL
If you are developing an iPhone application and need to send such notifications, Easy APNS comes to the rescue. It is a PHP-MySQL-based solution for communicating with the APNS which describes every step of a standard setup in detail. The solution works by inserting push messages into a MySQL table and sending them with the help of a cron job.
[zilla_button url=”http://www.easyapns.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
14. Adaptive Images : Auto Deliver Small Images to Small Devices
Adaptive Images is a solution for delivering browser-size-specific images for any device.. automatically. It is JavaScript-PHP-powered where a lightweight JS file detects the browser size and the PHP file resizes the images on the web page. And, all this happens with the help of a .htaccess rule which redirects any requests for .JPG, .GIF or .PNG files to the PHP image processor file. Adaptive Images is a plug ‘n’ play resource which can be easily integrated into any PHP website. There is a built-in caching system for minimizing each image only once for each size.
[zilla_button url=”http://adaptive-images.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
15. Mobile.js : Convert Websites into Mobile Quickly
Mobilize.js is a HTML5-JavaScript framework for creating mobile websites from any standard sites quickly and easily.
The idea behind the framework is; rather than serving a totally different mobile web page, loading and using only the needed parts and displaying them inside a mobile theme (jQuery Mobile’s default theme). Mobilize.js can be used on every website, however, for WordPress and Sphinx users, there are plug ‘n’ play solutions provided. It is open source and can be hosted under the website or a free-to-use CDN-hosted version is offered too.
[zilla_button url=”http://mobilizejs.com/” style=”green” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
Make Your Own Apps
[zilla_alert style=”green”] If none of the apps presented here do not meet your needs, or you have something else in mind such as an idea of your own, but lack the development skills by which to create your very own- then you should take a look at AppMakr . It is a do-it-yourself platform by which to create content-based apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. The best part about AppMakr’s creation process is that it requires no coding knowledge and builds apps with a WYSIWYG editor, and furthermore : its FREE [/zilla_alert]
The AppMakr platform uses RSS to power any content in a creator’s app. This content may include text, images, podcasts, audio, and video. One can also add location-aware GeoRSS and Media RSS feeds. Additionally, the platform allows an “in-app” HTML, which serves locally from the mobile device and can access its camera, accelerometer, and other built-in features.
Inside the AppMakr editor, creators have the flexibility in customizing the look and feel of their apps by designing their own icons, splash screens, headers, and tab icons. If one does not want to design graphics themselves or does not possess the tools by which to do so, the platform presents a database of icons to choose from and pulls images from related web searches.
[zilla_toggle title=”WATCH : AppMakr How To Video” state=”closed”] [/zilla_toggle]
Inside the AppMakr editor, you have the flexibility in customizing the look and feel of the app by designing your very own icons, splash screens, headers, and tab icons. If you do not want to design graphics on your own or do not possess the tools by which to do so, the platform presents a database of icons to choose from and pulls images from related web searches.
