Monday, March 22, 2010

What Dreams May Become - Make your own Iphone and Droid Apps

http://www.appcelerator.com/

We all have that one idea that we hold on to because we are affraid it will get stolen yet it will never hit the market because we don't have the skills to build it. You still likely don't have the skills but this might be your chance to give it a try without having to be a expert programmer.

This is free with free community support or you can get better support packages for a fee.


Titanium makes cross-platform native application development easy.

A free and open source application development platform, Titanium let’s you create native mobile and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. Learn More.


Rich Multimedia

Titanium offers music, photo and video streaming/storing on a user’s device as well as custom video playback controls.

Flexible Storage: Filesystem, Database On Device

Store user preferences, save data files, or implement the mobile version of a cookie using SQL Lite and the iPhone / Android’s native file system.

Unlimited Extensibility

Titanium’s plug-in architecture allows you code modules in Objective-C or Java to extend your mobile app with custom native functionality and then call those modules using Javascript in Titanium.

Your Best Shot: Access the Camera or Video Camera

Snap a photo or video, store it on the phone, and push it to Flickr, Youtube, or your website.

Cloud-Connected Apps

RESTful web services are easy to tap into with Titanium. We’ve also included a full SOAP client for making SOAP API requests. And we’ve bundled in support for over 300 APIs via Yahoo YQL.

Code like it’s the year 2020: HTML5 and CSS3 support

Built on top of the latest Webkit rendering engine, Titanium lets you develop advanced animations and sophisticated interface




You can also check out this site that is iphone only:
http://gamesalad.com/products/creator

Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Sky is the Limit - Not Really

http://www.stellarium.org/

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.



sky

* default catalogue of over 600,000 stars
* extra catalogues with more than 210 million stars
* asterisms and illustrations of the constellations
* constellations for twelve different cultures
* images of nebulae (full Messier catalogue)
* realistic Milky Way
* very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset
* the planets and their satellites




interface

* a powerful zoom
* time control
* multilingual interface
* fisheye projection for planetarium domes
* spheric mirror projection for your own low-cost dome
* all new graphical interface and extensive keyboard control
* telescope control



visualisation

* equatorial and azimuthal grids
* star twinkling
* shooting stars
* eclipse simulation
* skinnable landscapes, now with spheric panorama projection

customisability

* plugin system adding artifical satellites, ocular simulation, telescrope configuration and more
* add your own deep sky objects, landscapes, constellation images, scripts...