Mum makes an app with Icenium and Kendo UI Mobile + GitHub Part 1/2

You might be surprised that although I work for Telerik as an evangelist I haven’t tried all our products. We have a lot of products, and I don’t have a lot of time. But with BUILD coming up, I’ve decided to try out and learn the ins and outs of every single product we have. And the best way to do that is by teaching somebody else, and then sharing it with the world.

This time I decided to have my mum, who does not know how to code, create an application with JavaScript and HTML with the newly launched cloud based cross development platformIcenium (we used Icenium Mist which is 100% cloud based- nothing to download and accessible from any device anywhere) and Kendo UI Mobile. You can compile and run the code in the simulators from any device, which is awesome as I left my Mac back at home.

Let’s meet my mum first.

This is Corina.

This is my mum, Corina :)

She works as a project manager, and has an electro engineer background. She is also a teacher, climbing instructor, practices martial arts and 1000 more things. My mum is a super-mum, and I’m her biggest fan. There is nothing she hates more than not knowing something, and I’ve never heard her say ‘I can’t do that’ (within reason). So when I asked her if she wanted to make an app, she said ‘sure- how long will this take us?’. With coffee cup in hand we sat down and started making an app.

Getting started with Icenium

From zero to publish Mum’s Herb App in 5 hours

Icenium has a 30 day trial, so I used my customer Telerik account and logged in. Once you log in you can choose between a desktop environment with cloud elements, or a cloud only solution. We went for the cloud only- and I actually was able to code from my iPad, my phone, and a Surface RT. Running the simulator didn’t work on all devices – but I didn’t expect it to do so either. Mum really loved the IDE, and she quickly understood how everything works. Once we were set up it was time to get started for real. So far we had used 10 minutes (with discussion).

Time passed: 10 minutes

Pre-started projects you can choose between with Icenium, blank, with Kendo UI or jQuery or… + +

I started of explaining the tools and languages we were using. This took about 30 minutes with Q and A. The most important parts were explaining the difference between the view, the data and the logic connecting the two. We decided not to do any CRUD operations on data, as that would add another level of complexity which we didn’t want the first round of app development. AT the same time a simple Hello World would be way to easy- and not very engaging.

Time passed: 40 minutes

Mum showing the final product to her mum (my grandmother)

Then we brainstormed for a fun, but simple application idea. We had 4 hours to code, and the aim was to get the app published.
Mum came up with the idea of an app that has a list of the top ten most used herbs, and the name of the herb translated in Norwegian and Romanian (from English). We speak several languages as at home and we *always* forget what the herbs are called.

We were happy and excited, and we had a mental idea how we wanted the application to look like, so we proceeded with putting together the list with the data and ended up with a model. WE would have an array of items with three language properties. We made a function that returned the data as a datasource, and all in all this took less than 30 minutes.
It was time to put together the view. Next part coming up tomorrow :)

Time passed: 1 Hours 10 minutes

Mum makes an app with Icenium and Kendo UI Mobile + GitHub Part 1/2

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