This article is cross-posted from my DotNetNuke blog.

On August 18th we kicked off the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group. ...

This article is cross-posted from my company blog.



Last...

Last night we held the kick-off for the third in our DotNetNuke Hackathon series of events.  Now that the user group meeting is over and the UStream event is through, we can focus on building some really exciting mobile applications for the actual Hackathon.  The following schedule lays out the timeline for the remainder of this event:

We left plenty of time so that anyone who wants to participate has enough time to come up to speed on mobile app development and still get an awesome app built by the August 27th deadline.  I know that we already have participants talking about all of the great mobile apps they are working on and plan to submit for the contest.  With an iPad and some Android phones up for grabs I am certain we’ll have some really amazing entries, and like all of our community contests, the code for all of these applications will be available in the DotNetNuke Forge.  Even if you don’t win, you are certain to learn a new skill that will come in handy as mobile devices become more ingrained in our day to day lives and mobile application development takes a more prominent place in the software development world.

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.