While presenting at the iPhone Developer Summit West in Santa Clara at the beginning of November, I met Lee Barney who was also presenting. Lee teaches at BYU Idaho, and Lee has a very cool open source product called Quick Connect (http://quickconnect.sourceforge.net.) Quick Connect allows you to write iphone applications(among other things) using javascript. But a recent post by @quickconnect on twitter makes QuickConnect something that is truly a game changer in mobile development.

As we move into 2010 the ability to create an application once that runs on multiple mobile platforms is another growth area. A year ago, everything was iPhone, and iphone still remains the smart mobile platform with the most momentum(100K apps as of Oct 27.) This is rapidly changing as the smart mobile market continues to defy gravity in this recession prompting other players throw their hats into the ring.

For instance, we are finally starting to see some significant headway by Android powered phones, continued momentum from Blackberry, Palm is a significant platform contender, and Nokia’s N900 is just entering the market this month. As these other platforms start to make headway we have a problem as mobile product companies.

How do you manage the multiple languages/platforms that are required to deploy to all of these platforms? For instance, Apple’s iPhone is based on Objective C/Cocoa Touch, Blackberry is predominantly J2ME, Android is Java based as well, and Nokia’s N900 is Qt based. In short, there is going to be some volatility in platform for smart mobile devices for the foreseeable future. What do you do if you want to deploy across the spectrum?

On Nov 18, the following tweet came across from @quickconnect. http://m.twitter.com/quickconnect/statuses/5840925385) “Goal of playing: One Xcode project that builds and runs in simulators for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Palm WebOS. All with one command.”

When completed, that is a game-changer in mobile development. Since VM’s are not allowed on iPhone, and given the vast differences in implementation technologies across the spectrum of smart mobile platforms Quick Connect allows companies to stay focused on the business challenges, not the system challenges of smart mobile applications. This is an invaluable option in this rapidly evolving space. The fact that it’s open-source is even better.

Definitely check out Quick Connect as a tool option for your next mobile application, and keep an eye on the mulit-platform mobile development space as a growth space for 2010 and beyond.

Hope all is well,
Jason