In this article I will have a first look at a cool new approach in mobile application development for various mobile operating systems, developed by a company called Steape.
“Steape has developed a unique innovative platform, via which it is pretty easy to build (highly advanced) applications in native language for five of the most common mobile operating systems: OSX (iPhone), Android, Symbian S60, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.”
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR0LuVpvOE8
Each of this mobile operating systems has its own programming language, and every mobile operating system has its distinct set of unique features that makes the operating system the best choice for its end-users.
However Steape limits down the knowledge of each of the different program languages and makes mobile application development even simpler (at least in concept):
“The platform developed by Steape is available through a web-environment and is working with a so called ‘drag and drop’ user interface in the Steape web-portal.”
On the corporate website Steape has a demo video of the ‘drag and drop user interface’ of the web-portal to give you a sneak peak how the application development works in practice.
The more technical oriented application developers or people with a formal IT background would probably like to know more about the technology implications or how the web-portal architecture is build, and therefore you can download a Technical White Paper directly from the Steape website.
Concluding thoughts and wrap-up
I would like to start my concluding thoughts with the remark that I don’t have a formal IT eduction, and don’t work in the application development domain. Therefore I can’t value this approach from a technical perspective, but I will try to make some remarks from a business (development) perspective.
At first I like the theoretical concept of building an application on one platform, and transform the input of this platform into output code of the native programming language of the five leading mobile operating systems (iPhone, Android, Windows Phones, Symbian & BlackBerry).
With simplifying the development and applying a kind of automatic parrallel-development you can from a developer’s perspective significantly speed-up the time to market which saves costs and you can outperform competition.
Furthermore each of these mobile operating systems is bundled with a native application store, which increases the visibility of the application across the different platforms as well as it increases the number of cash flows via the different channels.
However will the Steape platform also hold for highly complex applications, which require interactions with remote servers or think about enhanced security features which can result into highly complex implementations. Furthermore you could also think if the intital user experience of the basic application idea, will hold and be as good on every mobile operating system.
I would like to conclude that Steape is an interesting platform that certainly has great potential and I truly like it in concept (from a business development perspective). I hope that some developers and people with an IT background can drop some comments and share their thoughts from a technical perspective !
