Tersus.com - Blog

Getting Hooked on Visual Programming

Sun, 31 May 2009 04:52:19 +0000

It is interesting how people sometimes find they have changed during the process of learning a new technology.

Here is a mail sent a couple of month ago by Joel Barel:

Several days ago I asked one of our Burmese developers how the Tersus modeling experience (1 year now) has affected his programming skills.

He said that Tersus is very easy to use, very fast, definitely better etc. and then he said there is one major problem he cannot overcome...

I asked him: “what is it?”

And he answered: “sometimes at home, I still use traditional coding for certain projects that friends are asking me to help with. I often look at the lines of code in concentration, figuring out in my head what needs to be added or changed, and then instinctively looking to drag with the mouse the required Tersus building blocks (which of course aren’t there), finding myself trying to model on a code-editor... “

Ofer & Youval

Tersus and iPhone

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:37:13 +0000

We've just released Tersus 1.3.6, the first version of the platform that officially supports iPhone applications. This is a good time to discuss our understanding of the key requirements from a mobile application development platform. These insights are guiding our development efforts.

Ease of development

Before iPhone, mobile application development required specialized platforms (Bru, J2ME, Symbian), and was limited to relatively few developers.
iPhone changed that in 2 ways:

Thanks to its full fledged browser, you can develop web applications in a standard way and have them run on iPhone
If you're a Mac developer, you can create native applications for iPhone while working in a familiar environment.

Tersus already makes it very easy to develop iPhone web applications. We are now working on doing the same for native iPhone applications.

Access to device features

A key requirement for a mobile development platform is the ability to access device features like location information (GPS), local storage, camera, etc.
Mobile web applications are currently limited in this respect. This is one of the key reasons we are giving a high priority to the development of native iPhone applications with Tersus.

Ease of deployment

With desktop applications, you can create, test and run the applications on your own computer. For mobile applications this is not as easy:

For a mobile web application, you need to deploy your application on an internet server
For a native mobile application, you need to package the application in the appropriate format and transfer it to the mobile device

For web applications, the Tersus Quick Hosting feature makes deployment a no hassle process. For native iPhone applications, we'll perform the appropriate packaging.

Cross-platform development

iPhone is cool, but other devices are catching up. We want our applications to run on any mobile device, with little or no modifications.
For web applications, this is easy. As more mobile devices get powerful web browsers, we'll make the minor changes required in Tersus to support them.
As for native mobile applications – we're starting with iPhone, but will support additional platforms over time. Basic applications should work the same across platforms, but some aspects, like window size and specific device features, may require tuning for specific devices.

Transition from web applications to native applications

For both developer and user, it makes a lot of sense to start with a web application. Users can begin using the web application right away.
Still, there are good reasons to also develop a native version of your application:

Faster loading
Access to more device features, including location information and local storage
Offline availability

Once Tersus supports the creation of native applications, the transition from web to native will be practically seamless.

Ofer & Youval

What are we up to?

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:58:25 +0000

Tersus was published as an open source platform three and a half years ago, in mid 2005.

Since then, we have been constantly improving the platform, and were happy to see the small but warm community of developers created around it.

Nevertheless, so far we have done practically no marketing activities to advertise Tersus. We felt we first want to have a mature enough product, and only then we'll go for a bigger community of users.

When we say "mature product", we mean two things – Productivity and Ease of Use.

Productivity means the platform is powerful enough to build all types of software applications and experienced Tersus users can be productive in developing, testing and maintaining their applications. As we are using the platform ourselves to develop rather complex systems, we know we have already reached this target, although we keep enhancing the platform.

Ease of Use means different things for different people. The novice needs easy to understand demos and good tutorials, while the experienced developers expect full documentation, development tips, shortcuts, and other tools that will help them become even more productive. We are not satisfied yet with the level of our tutorials and documentation, especially for beginners, and we are working on some new stuff now (e.g. the Table Wizard and a new iPhone demo). Newcomers, not necessarily programmers, should be able to quickly understand what Tersus is about and develop their own small applications without the help of another person.

So what next?

In the near future, we'll publish the next major release (1.3.x), and will begin to proactively reach out to new developers.

We will continue to share our thoughts with you through this blog.

Ofer & Youval