Category Archives: Announcement

Dailymotion integrates the Joshfire Factory to create apps in a single click!

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Today, Dailymotion is announcing its partnership with Joshfire to allow every MotionMaker and Official User (creative members and partners) to create applications without any programming knowledge needed.

Based on open technologies and web standards, the Joshfire Factory lets you overcome the development complexity of the various platforms by creating from the interface native applications deployable on all connected devices: tablets (iPad, Android ), smartphones (iPhone, Android), connected TVs or any other device with a web browser.

With the Joshfire Factory directly integrated and freely available from Dailymotion, generating an application becomes a breeze: the user selects the appearance of its application among a list of templates, adds the contents of his choice from multiple data-sources (Dailymotion, of course, but also RSS feeds, blogs, Twitter, calendars …), adds features and selects the targeted platforms. Joshfire handles the deployment of the result and the application can then be tested directly from the browser or on the destination devices.

Create an app from Dailymotion using the Joshfire Factory

This partnership allows Dailymotion users to access a catalog of more than 30 million videos to create and enhance their applications. A Motionmaker may integrate in its application videos available on its own behalf or on the subject of their choice without any programming knowledge.

The Joshfire Factory is available from Dailymotion’s Motionmaker and Official Users profile pages via a dedicated link “Create an app” and in the “Extras” accessible from the footer.

For full details, watch this video tutorial:

Get ready for Windows 8: generate your Metro styled applications with the Joshfire Factory

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“Windows 8 is coming…”

The public release date of Windows 8 should be october 26th, will you be ready? The Joshfire Factory is here to help.

This new Windows release is a major change for end users: by default, a new User Interface (formerly called Metro) is the new main screen of the OS and applications will mainly be installed from the Windows Store. Every new PC or Windows tablet will run Windows 8. Users will expect to find your app inside the Windows Store, the same they expect to find it on the Apple Store or Google Play.

Hopefully, we are proud to present our new Windows 8 Metro template and deployers for the Joshfire Factory. We did all the work for you, you only have to configure it.

The Joshfire Factory is a free online tool that focuses on easy cross-device application creation and deployment. It doesn’t require any line of code: you create your application from within the browser.

Our Windows 8 template

This template lets you display your existing content with a perfect the Windows 8 UI style, we worked closely with Microsoft to make sure it meets perfectly their design guidelines. It is compatible with desktops and tablets. Watch the video below to see the template in action with the TEDxParis app:

The main screen of your generated application is made of tile groups of your various data sources:

The main screen of the generated Metro application

Clicking on a content item goes to a detail view. We currently support Articles, Pictures and Videos. You can then easily slide to the next and previous item.

Video detail page

You can share the current item using the new share button from the “charm bar” (this is something that every Windows 8 app should support to integrate best with this new Windows 8 UI):

Detail view of a picture, sharing it on twitter

A metro application can be “snapped”  to the left of the screen. Your application will adjust its design to fit in this small area. This allows your user to continue browse your content (for example to watch a video) while working in another application.

The generated application is snapped on the left

Windows 8 deploy

Windows 8 apps are compiled into native applications and distributed from the Windows Store. The same way we build your iOS or Android application on our servers, you can start the compilation of your Windows 8 application right from your browser and download the generated file.

If you prefer to download a Visual Studio 2012 project of your app, and build it yourself, you can, we detailed how to launch your generated application in our user documentation.

 

Start generating your Windows 8 application right now for free, visit the Joshfire Factory

The Joshfire Factory simplifies the creation of cross-device applications and anticipates tomorrow’s connected things era

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Today, Joshfire publishes the first applications factory targeting desktops, mobiles, tablets, connected TVs and connected things. Based on open Web standards, the Joshfire Factory lets users create applications with just a few clicks, abstracting away the specificities and technical divergences of the underlying hardware. The Factory features a marketplace coupled with a platform of services, targeted at webmasters and application developers. Companies that are used to invest a lot of resources in the development of applications may subscribe to a dedicated Pro offer and benefit from a streamlined production solution to develop cross-device applications.

Service and content providers have been facing the issue of technology fragmentation since the rise of smartphones, tablets, and smartTV. Up until now, an application had to be designed once per screen type and per technology. The Joshfire Factory revolutionizes this approach. In the same way CMS tools such as WordPress or Drupal revolutionized the Web around 2000, the Joshfire Factory lets editors create cross-device applications in a few simple steps. The creation process involves the selection of datasource connectors, an application template, possible add-ons, and the list of devices to target. Within minutes, the Factory may generate Web applications and binaries for all types of screens and platforms. Current version is compatible with Web applications, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, MacOSX, Windows, GoogleTV, Samsung TV, Philipps TV and LG smart TV.

The solution greatly improves applications lifetime. The Factory will integrate new devices as soon as they are released on the market. Given the clean split between datasources, templates, add-ons, configuration, and deploys steps, Factory users will save up to 3/4 of the development time needed to adapt an application to a new class of terminals. With the advent of the Internet of things and Ubimedia, about 10 billions of new devices will hit the market by 2020. The Joshfire Factory also aims at simplifying the adaptation of existing apps to these new objects.

Based on open standards and technologies, Factory users remain free: applications are built on open technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript and NodeJS. Most open source JavaScript frameworks may be used to create templates (including Sencha and JQuery). Each created application may be downloaded, including its source code, and hosted, maintained or updated outside of the Joshfire Factory.

Users of the Joshfire Factory may choose between three offers. A basic and free offer, to create multi-device applications in a few clicks or make developers’ life easier. A premium offer to create applications with a set of advanced components and value-added services. Eventually, a Pro offer targeted at businesses.

Contact : 

Michel LEVY-PROVENCAL 

Joshfire / CEO

m@joshfire.com

 

Steren GIANNINI 

Joshfire / Product manager

steren@joshfire.com


Sylvain ZIMMER

Joshfire / CTO

s@joshfire.com

Meet with the Joshfire team

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Among other events, we will celebrate this Wednesday (May 9) in our office the public launch of the Joshfire Factory.

Here is a list of events that Joshfire team members will attend. Ping them if you want to talk or arrange a meeting.

BlackBerry World 2012
May 1-3, 2012 – Orlando, U.S.
Thomas took the plane for Orlando as he was invited to the BlackBerry World conference.

Kiwi Party
May 4, 2012 – Strasbourg, France
Steren will talk about the role of web technologies in today’s and tomorrow’s internet of things.

Joshfire Factory Launch
May 9, 2012 - Paris, France
You are welcome for a breakfast at 10:30am at the Joshfire office to assist to the public launch of the Joshfire Factory. Michel will talk about the Joshfire vision, do a demo of the Factory to the public and answer all your questions.

The NYC JavaScript & HTML5 Monthly Hackfest
May 9 2012 – New York, U.S.
Sylvain will demo the Factory at this JS/HTML5 meetup during his trip to NYC. He will also be available in NYC from May 12 to 15 for rendez-vous.

Mobile Monday
May 14, 2012 – Paris, France
Steren will present the recently released Joshfire Factory to this event dedicated to HTML5 apps at La Cantine.

WebSchoolFactory Hackathon
May 11-13 2012 – Paris, France
Steren will be part of the jury on Sunday for this parisian Hack Day. He will also present the Joshfire Factory at the beginning of the event to help participants build apps quickly during the weekend.

SudWeb 2012
May 25-26 2012 – Toulouse, France
Thomas will give a 1-hour overview of the advantages of the Open Web for cross-device development.

web2day
June 1, 2012 – Nantes, France
Nicolas will attend web2day. Feel free to ping him to talk about the Joshfire Factory or the internet of things.

Over the air
June 1-2, 2012 – Bletchley Park, UK
François will be in London to talk about how we can use JavaScript and other web technologies to build applications that share a lot of code between platforms and that compete with “native” applications.

Looking forward to meeting you at these events. There are more to come in the future. If you want to invite us to an event or give us feedback, do not hesitate to contact us!

Want to add your Data Source to the Factory? Join our hack day on March 27th!

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As you may know, Joshfire has a strong hacker culture ;-) We regularly hold company-wide hack days where everybody is free to work on a small project of his choice to be demoed at the end of the day. It is a fantastic way to foster innovation and creativity.

The Joshfire Factory is an open ecosystem. We have already fully documented the development process of templates and everybody can freely import custom templates into the Factory. This is not true for Data Sources yet but we are working on making it possible soon.

Data-sources currently available in the Factory

How soon? Well, our next hack day is March 27th and it will be about creating new Data Sources for the Factory. And because Data wants to be Open, we’re actually opening this hack day to everyone!

So if you are a content provider, have a startup with an API, or just want to hack, you can join us on March 27th and we guarantee that by the end of the day you’ll be able to build cross-devices apps based on your data!

We’ll start the day with a short technical overview of our Data platform and then you’ll be able to hack on your own Data Source, with the help of Joshfire developers and the Factory documentation. As you can see in this documentation the Data Sources are fully written in JavaScript and normalize their data around schema.org, which makes them compatible with all the templates. So if you can write JavaScript, you’ll be able to bind your data to the Factory!

We have opened an Eventbrite for this hack day : http://hackdayfactorydatasources.eventbrite.com/

Register ASAP and contact us if you have any questions!

Private beta: invitations

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After a month of internal testing, we are now expanding our private beta program. In order to gather feedback properly, registration still requires an invitation. If you would like to be part of the first beta testers, we invite you to leave your email on our home page.

What’s new in this first release ?

Quick Deploy: Joshfire is now offering an easy to use hosting service. No configurations needed to deploy your application on the web. We take care of the deploy process and hosting. During the beta, this service is free of charge, after that, it will require a subscription fee, depending on the usage of your application.

TV Deploys (Samsung SmartTV, LG, Philips): while they are not fully automated yet, users can now contact the Joshfire staff to deploy on TV application marketplaces.

Getting started messages: our work to help the user with its first experience with the factory was to add some getting started messages, to better explain how to use every step of the app cation process.

Automatically add new datasources to already configured templates: now, when you create a new datasource, it is added to your configured templates. While we reckon the system is not perfect yet because don’t take into account the type of the sources, it speeds up the app creation process and populate the template with content more easily.

Templates:
We opened this private beta with new templates, which makes a total of 11 templates:


Sleek: a very polished template for mobile and TV. We put a lot of effort into creating a pleasant user experience: transition between views, responsiveness, precise deign…

GeoContent: This template is dedicated to geolocalized datasources. It features stories, one at a time, on a map or globe. Only items containing geographical coordinates will be displayed. The templates adapts itself to the device by either displaying a 3D globe or a 2D map.

Wine: this mobile template displays an image and some basic texts on its first screen. Its sections are an a glossy and stylish design.

Some templates such as “Café & Bistro” or “Spot” look similar to the ones previously mentioned, and they are. We added them to explicitly show what they can be used for: The first one is perfect for a mobile app about a restaurant, the second is great for tourism: present a city, a monument or a particular place to visitors.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback based on your first tests. We are building the Factory for you.

Factory is entering private beta

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On January 25th, the Joshfire Factory will be entering private beta. It’s a big day for the team as we have been working for months on this first version. Now we think it’s ready to be tested in real situations and generate its first apps.

Internally, the Factory has already been fully used to create the TEDxConcorde app for iOS and Android. So today, we are committed to maintain a stable service.

As beta testers, you will be testing this first version. We would really appreciate your feedback. We are building this tool for you and will value every piece of feedback to improve it. We are here to listen, help and answer your questions on our Get Satisfaction support page or on twitter.

Today, only the Factory is ready for testing, we will be iterating very soon on a public landing website and a user documentation explaining the service to newcomers.

Developers can already start working on their own templates, if you want to know more, please visit the developers documentation.

We are really excited to open the Factory to our first beta users.
Don’t forget to follow the Factory on twitter.