Alex Caccia’s Ideaworks has spent the last five years trying to figure a way to make the development of applications for mobiles more profitable.
At the moment, there’s too many types of handset and operating system. Yes, you can develop a game for the iPhone, and then tweak it for the Smart phone market. But there’s so much work involved you really might as well be starting all over again.
Ideaworks has invented a way to unify all the fragments of the mobile market, and allow you to address them all, at once, relatively easily. It has created a cross platform development environment, Airplay SDK You write a game once, and Airplay SDK enables you to recompile it, and port it onto any other mobile phone, no matter what the handset or the operating system.
How does it work? Most phones run on the same CPU design. Around 99 per cent of the mobile phone chips used are based on the original ARM architecture. SDK has worked out how to automatically change the C++ instructions in application code into instructions for the ARM chip. “We don’t do middle ware, we go straight to the metal, to the lowest common denominator,” says Caccia.
The upshot, for developers, is that having built a game, you don’t have to retouch it.
Licensing for SDK starts at just $99. For just 99 dollars, you can follow your iPhone launch with a new version for Android and Windows, in days. Well, hours even.
“Just click a button, and we do the build,” says Caccia.
Could this herald a boom in mobile games and application development?