Mobile Technology 2011/01 Back in November 2010, the guys from Mobile Technology magazine asked me if I was interested in writing some articles about mobile widgets for their next issue. Of course I was and so I started writing two articles, which are part of the cover story of the current issue (2011/01).
The first article deals with mobile widgets in general. It gives an overview of what mobile widgets are, shows advantages and disadvantages of mobile widgets compared to native applications, gives a summary of the various standards (and the bodies that issue them) that are available for widget development, highlights tools for widget development and points out the different widget runtimes that are available. There is also a small tutorial demonstrating how to develop a basic “Hello World” widget.
The second article digs a bit deeper and shows how mobile widgets can be used to access device APIs. There is a more general introduction to the topic as well as two full examples: One example shows how to access the GPS sensor of a device; the second example shows how to fetch the device’s accelerometer data. Having access to the device itself makes it possible to create widgets that (almost) behave like native applications.
The latest issue of Mobile Technology is now available at you favorite newsstand (unfortunately only in Germany, afaik). For more information, please visit their website at Mobile Technology.
Update 1: The first article is now available online.