TapLynx spotted in the wild
October 14th, 2009 by Chris
Our pal Brent Simmons, noted developer of the renowned NetNewsWire for the for the Mac and iPhone, has just released his latest NewsGator project into the wild : TapLynx.
TapLynx lets you create an iPhone media application without a lick of Objective-C or Cocoa code. Using the SDK you can link against the TapLynx library, configure a plist, edit a few HTML files and in an amazingly short amount of time you’ll have a custom application presenting content from a variety of sources. The framework is adept at displaying, text, image and video content. The user interface is highly configurable and offers a variety hooks to customize the appearance.
I took it for a spin this morning and was able to produce this RogueSheep vanity application that featured content from this blog as well as the @postageapp twitter feed in something like 15 or 20 minutes :
Two nifty features :
- You can add custom tabs running your own code if you have Cocoa expertise.
- The application configuration can come from a URL, allowing the content and style to update dynamically without submitting a new application instance to the App Store. You can even add new tabs this way!
This is a great addition to any iPhone developer’s toolbox. We are already looking at ways this can help us with several of our clients. Thanks Brent!
Cocoa | Technology | iPhone
how much does it cost?
Its like $3500. Way overpriced.
Overpriced? For the individual developer working evenings on a new app, yes. But I don’t think that is the target market. I’ve turned away several iPhone app projects because I haven’t had the time to work on them. If I had this, I might not have turned them away.
Actually, the current pricing model isn’t permanent. We’re gathering feedback from users to decide what to offer in the future. Thanks for your interest!
It would cost us much more to develop the same functionality in house. We have a couple of opportunities for which this might already make sense. In particular one client that is interested, but would not want to spend enough to take on doing it from scratch, so this could be the difference between a good project and no project.