When you think of the NOOK or the NOOK Color, you think of reading. When we first looked at the NOOK Color, we found that not only were you able to read ebooks, you were able to work with text in many different ways, look at brilliantly colorful and digitally active magazines, and even interactive childrens books were part of the equation. Now we know this tablet to be much more versatile than that even, holding apps for games of all types as well. Today Barnes & Noble has announced a partnership with the well known development platform Appcelerator to further their dive into the much wider world of Android apps!
Appcelerator is what they note as “the leading enterprise-grade, cross-platform development solution on the market today” backing this up with such statistics as 1.5 million developers using their platform regularly as well as 25,000 cloud-connected mobile, desktop, and web applications having come out of their platform to be used by millions of users daily. That’s hefty. Appcelerator Titanium is a platform which allows completely cross-platform development for mobile, desktop, and web applications, and will most certainly entice many developers to work with Barnes & Noble to create apps that will now be more supported than ever by a network of helpers that want to see great apps made.
Barnes & Noble’s 7-inch VividView color touchscreen tablet is at the center of the party here, it being the closest device B&N have to what one might call a “standard” Android tablet. Of course its unique chassis entice many right alongside it’s ability to be hacked and turned into a standard B&N-less slate, but we don’t want that, right? And even moreso now that there’ll be a whole new wave of apps from the Appcelerator crews!
We’ll get to know a whole heck of a lot more later this month at Appcelerator’s CODESTRONG 2011 developer conference. At this conference we’ll see Barnes & Noble make an appearance or two at the conference, which takes place September 18-20, and we’ll be sure to relay the information they present (supposing you’re not there yourself!) NOOK on 2 the future!
I tried this out, but hit a massive failure with the B&N developer program itself. The Appcelerator platform actually worked quite well to get an app together. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it out to market in a reasonable timeframe, and B&N doesn’t really seem to be tooled up to address the issue. I would recommend any other developers to steer clear for a while. More details here:
http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2011/12/16/nook-developer-fail/