The future of mobile development

Most people think that Creo is “yet another prototyping tool” when in reality is something completely different and much more powerful.

Initially Creo was created because we felt the need to unify Design and Development in a new powerful tool that gives real time access to data and code execution preview traditionally available only at runtime.

In order to be able to offer such level of integration we developed a framework CreoKIT that enables us to execute any iOS on a desktop operating system. CreoKIT is so powerful that, unlike any other development tool out there, Creo users do not need to install Apple iOS Simulator to execute iOS apps. In many ways CreoKIT is even more powerful than Apple iOS Simulator because it is capable of running multiple independent iOS instances without the need to create multiple separate processes or without the limitation of executing just one app at a time.

CreoKIT was originally written in ObjC and we are currently converting it to Swift.

Swift represents the future of modern programming languages and it is just a matter of time that it will be fully supported by Android. What does this mean to CreoKIT and Creo?

Today CreoKIT can execute any iOS code on desktop and in order to create a fully featured iOS app we do not need to do anything special, we can execute the same code on both desktop and mobile iOS. The same exact approach will be used for Android (when Swift will be supported), then we’ll just need to develop a thin compatibility layer and we’ll be able to execute Android and iOS code using the same UIKit based code base.

We are a small team and therefore we are forced to prioritize our big plans. We are now focusing on iOS (Creo b5 will be available soon) and then we’ll focus on Android. A unified code base between mobile and desktop has never been so close.

This is a re-post of an article published on my personal personal blog: http://marcobambini.com/the-future-of-mobile-development/