1.0 Out and 1.1 Plans

Two weeks ago we released 1.0 to far greater than expected press and customer uptake. Frontpage stories on CNet, VentureBeat, InfoWorld, ArsTechnica and others, with very insightful analysis (although a few other articles confused us with a mobile web development solution because of our use of HTML to create views). Ryan Paul from ArsTechnica even wrote his own Windows Mobile app. Plus we’ve had several of our developers submit apps to the iPhone AppStore. VDGGroup released their IssuesToGo app – a mobile frontend to the popular LightHouse bug tracking that we’re happily using at Rhomobile to stay on top of our bugs. Wikimedia submitted their 1.0 based iPhone Wikipedia to the iPhone AppStore and will later move it to Android.

So 1.0 is out and now supports all shipping smartphones. Plus we have all the most important device capabilities (at least for enterprise app scenarios) covered. So what are we doing in the next release? 1.1 is slated for release in mid-May at Interop in Las Vegas. What’s new in 1.1 then? We are doing a lot of work to provide robust testing frameworks to enable developers to test their apps well. This includes providing the long asked for “desktop version of Rhodes”. You’ll be able to test your Rhodes app right from your Windows laptop without running an emulator.

We’re also doing a lot of performance work. This includes faster startup time for iPhone (already checked into the 1.1 unstable branch of Rhodes). It also includes faster data synchronization. One of the features is the ability to handle very slow backend apps by allowing queries to be queued and handled completely asynchronously (the queued sync option for a RhoSync source). This is also checked into RhoSync edge. There are several other RhoSync server and client performance improvements underway as well.

We’ll always add device capabilities in each of our point releases. For 1.1, by request of some Rhodes developers, we’ll be adding video play support.

But the biggest feature for Rhomobile coming over the next month is opening up the private beta of RhoHub. Explaining RhoHub however is a much bigger blog post to come.