One of the most requested products Dragonspire Media has received this year is mobile applications. I can’t count the number of times people have approached me asking if that’s something my company does. And unfortunately I’ve had to wave every request off because it’s not
Yet.
But mobile applications are on our horizon. About a month ago, Dragonspire took the plunge and invested in the necessary hardware to begin developing mobile applications. Developing for Android is easy. Applications on the Android platform are built with the Java programming language. Java itself is a free programming library, and the tools to both develop and test are also free and can be installed on any computer and any operating system. It’s what we like to call platform agnostic. Java just works everywhere.
Developing for iOS devices, however, is a whole different beast. Apple is hugely proprietary about their code, as they are about anything they do. As a result, you have to own one of their machines to properly develop for iOS. Applications designed for Apple devices – Macs, iPads, and iPhones – are built on Objective-C with Swift as their new, more user-friendly overlay. You can technically write all the code you need anywhere, but in order to test that code, you have to have one of their machines to test and debug it.
For Dragonspire Media this meant purchasing a Macbook Pro. And we’re excited about getting into mobile app development. It’s something we’ve wanted to offer for quite some time now, but the number of requests we’ve received this year provided the motivation to actually dive into those waters and get started. Right now we’re working on learning the codebase for iOS and ramping our skills and abilities for those tools. With any luck, by early 2019 we’ll able to start offering mobile application development to our product line.
So keep your eyes turned here. As soon as mobile applications become available, this will be the place you’ll hear about it. We’re excited about this expansion of our product line, and we can’t wait to offer mobile apps as either standalone products or addons to websites for those clients who find that a mobile option would be beneficial to their business.
Stay tuned! Exciting things are coming!