Public Radio PlayerNot just another pretty face
Posted: July 27th, 2009 | Author: Rekha from Public Radio Player | Filed under: Version 2.0 | 3 Comments »Anyone who has used the Public Radio Player can tell that this app is powered by some serious code. Giuseppe Taibi is a key member of our development team. His iPhone skills are big in Italy. (His family makes delicious olive oil, too.) For those of you with a technical mind and ample curiosity, Giuseppe provides a tour of the Player’s architecture.
My involvement with this project has been primarily as an expert in hybrid development techniques for the iPhone. Hybrid apps are a class of apps developed primarily using web standards (HTML, CSS and Javascript), then wrapped around a native Objective C/Cocoa Touch so that they can be conveniently distributed as binary via iTunes App Store. There are several advantages of following this approach to building iPhone apps:
- Short learning curve: Objective C is not as easy to learn as Javascript
- Faster development time: no need to compile app to test it as Javascript is interpreted
- Tapping into a large pool of talent: there are far more web developers than Objective C ones
- Portability: WebKit, the core engine for Mobile Safari, is also the core engine for other evolved smartphones web browsers such as Android, Palm Pre and Nokia’s Symbian.
WebKit is the fastest web engine on earth. It is also the one with the lightest footprint and, to top it off, it is also open source.
Need to be able to play while browsing other apps on the iPhone
otherwise this is fantastic!
Jim – That’s an Apple restriction. We’d love for the app to play in the background, too!
Jim – jailbreak & an app. called backgrounder is a solution to your request.