Mobile Dad

I love the innovation that is occurring in the field of visual application development. The tools we have today allows anyone to jump in and get started with just a simple idea or sketch. You can never really build a custom app without a bit of coding but visual tools provide a great framework to start from. Kind of like training wheels for a new environment. 280 North is demonstrating their new tool called Atlas built on top of the cappuccino framework:

What makes this tool exciting is what MobileCrunch is reporting about iPhone support. There is going to be support for the iPhone SDK that will wrap your Atlas-built application as a native iPhone app, giving you access to the API calls that can not be done in Apple’s Dashcode. This will be a great way for some of the departments at institutions I work with to get on board quickly developing tools to utilize more of the iPhone’s hardware without the stiff language ramp up. I am looking forward to trying out this tool once it becomes available.