Telerik's Webinar Week Session on Icenium

On Friday, November 1st, Rob Lauer and I had the chance to participate in Telerik's Webinar Week. We covered the Icenium Extension for Visual Studio - looking at how to get started with using Visual Studio and Icenium to build hybrid mobile apps, using custom Cordova plugins, and more. If you missed it (or if you saw it and can't wait to watch it again), check out the video.

During the webinar, we had a lot of great questions, so I'm including some of the most salient bits of Q&A in this blog post in case some of these are, in fact, the droids (or answers) you're looking for.

Q & A

Q: Does Icenium supports SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) also?

A: It depends on the platform being deployed to. At the moment iOS and Android do support SVG.

Q: Do you have any sample projects which demonstrate connecting to a hosted SQL Server using Icenium?

A: the sample app I showed is hitting a Web API endpoint wrapping SQL Server in Azure: https://github.com/Icenium/chuck-facts. You can also see the sample apps we have available here: http://www.icenium.com/cordova-phonegap-mobile-app-development/sample-apps.

Q: Is Icenium include in the Ultimate version?

A: DevCraft ultimate includes Icenium http://www.telerik.com/purchase.aspx

Q: Is publish to microsoft store and blackberry store on the roadmap ?

A: Windows, yes, we're hoping to have support by the end of the year. BlackBerry is still up in the air, see http://www.icenium.com/blog/icenium-team-blog/2013/10/17/is-this-the-end-for-blackberry.

Q: I am a full-time Windows Mobile Device developer. What versions of Windows Mobile OS does Icenium support?

A: By the end of the year Icenium will support WP8

Q: Microsoft has not supported Windows Mobile development past VS2008, does Icenium integrate into VS2008 & allow its full-features?

A: The Icenium Extension supports 2010, 2012 & 2013 editions of Visual Studio

Q: I'm not sure to understand the difference between Icenium and Everlive ?

A: Icenium is for developing hybrid iOS and Android applications. Everlive is a back end as a service; you can use it to store data, manage users, etc.

Q: When using icenium, is the UI and functionality consistent across all devices? I ask this because the Android platform is very fractured with many vendors coming out with their own flavor of Android.

A: You can build whatever you would like; it's just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Kendo UI Mobile allows you to use either match the native platform or build a custom theme as well.

Q: Do we have any samples to access Native functionality which works for all platforms?

A: We have a number of sample applications here http://www.icenium.com/cordova-phonegap-mobile-app-development/sample-apps.

Q: how about a Telerik Icenium web page with links to helpful utilities like jshybugger and droidatscreen for all the different platforms including Android, Apple and Windows? Just learning about jshybugger and droidatscreen made this webinar more than worth the time! Thanks!!!

Sure! You can learn more about droid@screen here, and jsHybugger here. We also have a blog on jsHybugger coming out tomorrow, be sure to watch the blog!

Q: Can I use Icenium for complex apps? For example: Can I use web services to connect with database?

A: Yes. You can absolutely access APIs or services over HTTP. Telerik actually has a Backend-as-a-Service for just this - http://telerik.com/everlive.

Q: Does Icenium have some special animation effects? Or any animation effects package?

A: Icenium is tooling to build hybrid mobile apps - you can use any JS animation package you'd like. Kendo UI has a jQuery dependency, so you can use that, for example.

Those are just a few of the questions we received - hopefully one or more of the answers are what you were looking for if you've read this post!