Friday, August 28, 2015

Application development and deployment target.

Here's an exercise starting while laying on the beach totally disconnected. Yes WiFi does not work, data in roaming too expensive.

Funcky idea popped up:

I want to find examples of apps which cover the following basic set of deployment targets:

  1. mobile: Android / iOS, both mobile/tablets. Won't look for web/hybrid/native variants, just for functionality to work unde mobile umbrella, be it smartphone/tablets.
  2. web. Browsers, plain and simple (FF and Chrome, cross compatibility etc, frameworks these days make it easier)
  3. desktop. Here I see coverage of Linux, Mac and Windows.
edit: One could argue that web and desktop are pretty much the same. The contra-argument I'm making is the sync apps for clouds, for instance Box and Gdrive. These do not run in browsers, but on desktop. So keeping the two separate, with maybe countless of other examples. Browsers are not always desktop similar.

The three targets would then translate into the following list of sub-targets:
  1. Android - smartphone
  2. Android - tablet
  3. iOS - smartphone
  4. iOS - tablet
  5. web (let's assume Firefox and Chrome as one, who cares ;) 
  6. Linux - Ubuntu / Fedora ... here I'm missing technology to suggest one that works across distributions...except Java ... ha
  7. Mac OS X Yosemite ... again newbie, not sure what to pick
  8. Windows .... 10 ? not quite, let's just say 7 / 8.

And so I'm challenging my readers to give me examples of applications running on the 8 targets above.

What on earth is doing a startup coming with a brand new idea for a wonderful application (either commercial or open-source) if they cannot accomodate this list. You'd answer: they do what they can. Ok, good enough, however, myself as a consumer, I already use all those targets, in one way or another. And I'm starting to feel the need when looking to a new app and ask: ok, this app fails which bullet ? Then ... do I need it ?

And guess what, while writing this, it suddenly popped to me one example. Just one, for now: IBM Notes. Yes, good old Notes, is answering to the three "domains" above, here:

- mobile. Android/iOS, checked.
- web. checked, both Traveler / Verse.
- desktop. Mac checked, Linux checked, Windows checked.

Well, opened to more suggestions, hit me please.