Developing the Oxford Dictionaries Quick Search app

    Well here we are after what seems like an age of tweaking, the Oxford Dictionaries Quick Search app is finally available for installation. It can be found on the iTunes website here, and on Google Play here. The Windows Phone 8 version should with luck be out in a few days.
    As the developer of course I'm going to say it's a brilliant app, but that would verge on shameless astroturfing. What I can say is that it's a simple and lightweight free English dictionary look-up app that I hope users will find useful.
    Under the hood, it's a client for the Oxford Dictionaries API. This of course means that it requires a data connection to run, but does give the advantage of the app taking very little space and providing the most comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary entries. Though it's hardly a novel use for the API it does demonstrate the functionality and speed of the service, as well as the ease with which the API can be developed against.
    The app uses the PhoneGap cross-platform HTML5 app framework with jQuery and jQuery Mobile providing the Javascript heavy lifting and user interface respectively. These packages have allowed us to deploy the app on three platforms in quick succession with minimal investment, something we could not have done had we been required to write all three versions natively. The quirks of the different HTML5 implementations have caused us a few headaches along the way, but not significantly more than web developers are used to when dealing with different browsers.
    It's been interesting to compare side-by-side the ease of development on the different mobile platforms. Android is the easiest as you'd expect, but with a Wild West of devices and OS versions out there it needs to be. We've been scouring our colleagues for odd Android versions and form factors to try our app on, yet I'm sure we've not tried them all. In particular we decided that with 25% or thereabouts of the Android market we couldn't abandon support for version 2.3, so we've had to contend with its incomplete font support and sometimes shaky HTML5 implementation.
    iOS by comparison with a set number of devices should be easy to develop for but starts to become more effort due to the stringent demands of Apple. Attaching different iOS devices to our development environment can at times be a challenge, and the ballooning demand for supporting resources such as splash screens, icons and screenshots for different resolutions and OS versions sometimes feels as though it is getting out of hand. However the App Store approval process was much quicker than we expected it to be.
    The Windows Phone 8 development environment shows Microsoft's typical attention to detail. The supporting resource requirements are well-thought-out, getting the app on a device is straightforward, and the free version of Visual Studio is a delight to use. However the fact it would only run on 64 bit Windows 8 seems rather strange, and Microsoft have not quite shed their reputation for quirky HTML environments. I didn't expect the problem we had with an animated GIF loading spinner, for instance.
    So it's been an interesting experience. I'd recommend PhoneGap to anyone wanting quick development of multi-platform mobile apps, though it's provided a few learning experiences of its own.