Release of version 0.9.10 of Cappucino brought a new full featured TextView component. Since there have been many fixes, and it has been announced as one of the main features of Cappuccino 1.0, that will be released this fall.
This may be time to update Emotuned application / store builder.
Motorola Mobility’s Ninja HTML5 framework, that was unveiled mid-2012, however without new references since many months, was replaced by Google Web Designer, an Adobe Edge/Apple iAd Producer like HTML5 ads builder, then with limited scope (no more a rich internet applications builder). The Montage HTML5 framework (that was the basis for Ninja HTML5) is still available (open source).
We can find more details in this greatly written article, that underlines that there isn’t any HTML5 web applications solution (framework and builder) available (GWT is old, not HTML5 focused and no more driven by Google), only basic tools and low level frameworks (jQuery, angularJS, BackboneJS, Twitter Bootstrap).
We can however still use Cappuccino and Apple’s XCode/Interface Builder to build applications such as emotuned.com or direct2it.co (using Direct2CP’s solution mda approach allowed building these easily even without IB).
In fact all single page/anonymous div based frameworks can easily use HTML5 features when required, by extending existing components. That is adding/generating new doms elements (and/or new css values) to components. Cappuccino still uses CSS3 for Popover and other areas, while Direct2CP components wrap HTML5 audio and video tags (also use CSS3 animations) and new upload features.
Then a whole new HTML5 framework would not provide more (as many features aren’t HTML5 specific), at least a true HTML5 framework would be replacing all anonymous divs by WebGL elements (that is wrapping these in components) for rendering (HTML5 also provides features that aren’t display related, like storage).
Detailed informations about using macro/preprocessor directives for the new Objective-J 2.0 compiler are available here.
Intel provides HTML5 App Porter Tool (beta version) for iOS, that allows to parse (using Clang to retrieve AST) Objective-C code and Nib archives (intermediate XML files) and convert these to html/javascript and css (using HTML5 and/or jQuery depending on the features).
Not all APIs are mapped (a list is provided). Core Graphics APIs are mapped to Canvas (as Cappuccino did), UIKit views are translated to jQuery Mobile components (or using APT library widgets if no corresponding component is found), and controllers/delegates are implemented in APT package.
At slevenbits blog we can find an article about porting a Cocoa component (here a custom NSBox – with editable title) into a Cappuccino one. As expected, it only consists in replacing NS suffix with CP, pointer * sign, and modifying imports. Also in the example the event management (box title editing) is easier, as Cappuccino benefits from the textField html element provided by the browser (with Cocoa we have to determine the editing area and use a fieldEditor).
A new Xcode 4.5 update is available through the Mac App Store (1,6 GB). Among new features are auto layout (see article here) and OpenGL debugger.
An bistory of Emotuned application project can be found at DZone. It presents the project idea, the work on required framework (porting CP2JavaWS to php and adding new features), the CSS3 player wrapped to a new Cappuccino component, use of new Cappucino dynamic controls (popovers, animating), a new HTML5 drag and drop upload component (that works with Safari and Firefox), tricks for performance enhancement.
Apple provides iAd Producer 3.0 through Apple Developer program. It includes the following new features and enhancements :
• New templates
• New project overview user interface
• New layer list with search, re-ordering, and the ability to hide layers
• Project-wide shared layers
• Auto-advance between pages
• New built-in actions : Add calendar event, Send email, Place a call, Add contact, Add ringtone, Take screen shot, Set content offset for scrollView, Add PDF to iBooks, Set wallpaper, Save to photo library, Open URL, Take photo.
• iAd JS updated to version 1.6
Apple provides Mountain Lion through the Mac App Store (20$, 4 GB), and also XCode 4.4 and Safari 6.
Motorola Mobility (now Google) presents Ninja, an HTML5 development solution that features a client side and server side (using Node.js) framework, Montage, that provides UI components and templates, bidirectional data binding, persistence, serialization, event management (including KVO), and a visual designer (Ninja, made using Montage) that allows to create SVG, Canvas, WebGL and CSS3 based media using a timeline editor, and also manages binding of Montage components to create a rich web application. A test tool (Screening) for Montage based application is also provided.
The Montage project and Screening tool (alpha version) are available through Github, and Ninja editor is downloadable at Chrome App Store (requires Chrome).
Google then use standard technologies (HTML5), however in a proprietary environment (Chrome, and then Chrome OS).
ArsTechnica provides a detailed review of Ninja.
A new funding project has been created to help enhancing Emotuned free music platform infrastructure and content. It is hosted at indiegogo (as kickstarter is only available from US) . Click here to display details about gifts (named perks) that will ne provided to contributors.
By supporting the project you will allow :
The goal is to provide a 500 MB account per artist for their song’s samples, that is about 3 MB per song (two 1,5 MB samples files average – .m4a and .ogg), then close to 20 releases of 10 tracks each. Full songs files (encrypted archives) can still be stored at Dropbox, Sugarsync or GDrive as these are not streamed (downloaded at purchase time).
This extra storage requires a dedicated server (shared one for now to allow reduced costs), that is about 100$/month. The new server would allow faster start/download of the application (stronger and more reliable rate), faster streaming (no delay), for about 5000 artists (using a 2 TB disk).
Cjed Audio 