iPhone (any model) with iOS 4.3 or later.That’s pretty good, given the rather basic building blocks available in AppStudio.ĪppStudio apps run on the following platforms: The developer built his first version and had it live in a restaurant in a month. I was somewhat impressed by a food-and-beverage ordering app that runs on iPads, sends orders by Wi-Fi to the restaurant's server (running MySQL and a listener program), and caches orders in the iPads’ SQLite database when Wi-Fi is unavailable. NSB/AppStudio translates NSBasic to JavaScript on demand and before running or publishing an app. The AppStudio Showcase gives you a good feel for what other developers have done with the product, showing off about 20 apps, some free and some commercial.įigure 3. (You can subscribe to PhoneGap Build on a monthly basis or use it as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.) You’ll also need to add an Apple signing key to PhoneGap Build before it will build iOS apps for you, and you’ll need to upload final iOS apps to the iOS App Store from a Mac.ĪppStudio comes with more than 100 samples ranging from “hello, world” to demonstrations of using all the included controls, about 30 Web services, and a dozen third-party JavaScript libraries. You can build apps that are as complex as you’d like with AppStudio, although AppStudio doesn’t help much with back-end services.ĪppStudio has its own PhoneGap Build token, but if you want to build apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app stores, you’ll have to paste your personal PhoneGap Build token into AppStudio. Note that NSB/AppStudio is acting as the local Web server.Īs I mentioned earlier, the current AppStudio allows you to build both mobile Web apps and mobile hybrid apps the latter is facilitated by integration with the PhoneGap command-line interface (which you would need to install on your development computer or computers) and the Adobe PhoneGap Build service. A simple NSB/AppStudio form running in Chrome. It includes almost 60 controls ranging from simple labels to complex widgets and interfaces to financial services and social media.įigure 2. The selection of components is satisfying. Right-clicking on a control brings up a context-sensitive action menu (Figure 4) that lets you create and navigate to event handlers, add components, and adjust the layout. There’s much in the IDE under the nonintimidating surface. The IDE doesn’t do its own debugging, however - that's handled by the browser (Figure 2), or in the case of PhoneGap apps, through weinre, a remote debugger for Web pages. In the AppStudio IDE (Figure 1) we have a form designer, toolbox, project explorer, property sheet, and help windows, all familiar from VB and its heirs and imitators. Notice the familiar form designer, toolbox, project explorer, property sheet, and help windows. NSB/AppStudio is a drag-and-drop IDE for mobile Web and mobile hybrid app development, very much in the spirit of Microsoft Visual Basic. You can also display the JavaScript for any displayed form from the IDE (Figure 3).įigure 1. At app publication or runtime (Figure 2), whether for local development or server deployment, any Basic script is transcompiled to JavaScript. You can drag and drop your way to runnable mobile applications built from forms and controls (Figure 1), as well as write code either in NS Basic - essentially VBScript with a few extensions - or in JavaScript. The combination of ease of learning, ease of use, royalty-free distribution, and low prices helps AppStudio bring mobile Web and hybrid development to the masses, in the spirit of VB and the early Borland visual programming products. The AppStudio IDE was written in JavaScript, HTML5, and WebKit, and it runs on Windows and Mac OS X. The current version of NSB/AppStudio, 4.2.9, targets both mobile Web and mobile hybrid apps. Over the years, the company produced NS Basic versions for Palm, Symbian, and Windows desktops, then finally released NSB/AppStudio in 2010 for mobile Web development. In 1998, the company released a Windows CE version of NS Basic, which I reviewed for Windows Magazine. NS Basic, from the eponymous Canadian firm NS Basic Corporation, arrived in 1994 with a VB-like development environment for the Apple Newton. Yes, those novices had to write some code, but not much of it - and the code was in Basic, not the syntactically more difficult C language. In its day, circa 1991, Microsoft Visual Basic (aka VB) disrupted Windows development by making it possible for novices to drag and drop their way to runnable Windows applications built from forms and controls (originally called gizmos).
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