Background

In preparation for the upcoming DotNetNuke Hackathon in St. Louis, I have been busy working on a new mobile application for the Android and iPhone platforms.  Nik Kalyani and I have been playing with the Appcelerator Titanium product for the past several months and have been intrigued by it’s promise to allow you to quickly develop mobile applications for multiple platforms using the coding skills that many web developers already possess.  When Nik started planning for the St. Louis Hackathon he decided to focus on building apps which bridge the mobile and DotNetNuke space.  He immediately thought that Appcelerator was a natural tool to use.

What attracted Nik and I to Titanium was the ability to program in JavaScript with a light sprinkling of HTML and CSS to create native iPhone and Android applications.  It also helped that Titanium is an Open Source product which is a big plus for the DotNetNuke community.  The real Titanium magic happens when you compile your application using Titanium Developer.  At that point a native application is generated for either Android or iPhone, and coming soon the BlackBerry as well.  Titanium Developer lets you run your app on the various platform emulators as well as allowing you to push your application directly to a physical device.  As a final step, Titanium Developer even assists with publishing your finished application to the Android Market and the iPhone App store.

It has been almost 3 years since I got my last cell phone, a Blackberry 8800. While it was nice, the UI was very sparse, and dare I say ugly. Ever since the Palm Pre was announced earlier this year, I have been itching to get one. Unfortunately, they are not available on my current provider. My wife, her parents, and I all share a family plan on the T-Mobile network which allows us to keep our cell phone charges way down so if I was going to get a new phone, it would have to be one that T-Mobile offered. When my wife's phone suddenly died 3 weeks ago, we started looking at new phones and finally settled on the new MyTouch phones from T-Mobile. My wife does not use 90% of the features on her phone because she finds it a bit challenging to figure out. To help solve this problem, we both decided to get the same phone, so that I would be able to help her out if she had any questions or issues.