Developer interview 'Alessandro La Rosa'

Introduction

My name is Alessandro La Rosa, and I’m a mobile developer and enthusiast living in Rome, Italy. I’m the CTO of an Italian mobile software house, MobileSoft, that creates software for quite all the mobile technologies and platforms currently on the market.

I currently develop software for the following platforms and technologies: Java ME, Flash Lite, iPhone, Android and, of course, mobile widgets!

I also maintain a personal blog where I publish technical articles about mobile development: http://www.jappit.com

Why mobile widgets?

I’m an old school JavaScript developer, and I’ve always loved the ease and speed of development with Web technologies. So, when these technologies were brought to the mobile development world I was actually enthusiast, and I was right: there’s nothing as quick and fun as mobile Widgets in the mobile environment. After these first tests, I’ll surely write some other widgets for Betavine, to further investigate its potential.

What inspired you to write the Widget?

I’ve implemented several JavaScript games during University years, and I actually had great fun with them. So, I wanted to test how these would behave within the Betavine runtime. The result was absolutely good, and both interaction and widget’s performances were above my expectations. Next widgets will try to push boundaries more and more :)

How have you developed the Widget?

AnimaLogic was inspired from a classic puzzle game concept, that was quite suited to be ported to the Betavine runtime. Being a puzzle game where speed and quick interaction is fundamental, I’ve worked to implement a navigation-based interaction, so avoiding using the standard cursor to interact with the game elements. I’ve used custom JavaScript code and libraries: even if great JavaScript frameworks are available, I actually find more fun in writing all from scratch :)

Have you any advice for other developers?

Even if widgets can be built in few minutes, take particular care to user experience and usability.

Make frequent rounds of testing on real devices: only by using a real mobile phone you can have precise feedback about its real performances, usability and feeling.

What’s good and what needs improving?

The Betavine documentation and Getting Started resources are quite good to have a first idea about the widget runtime.

Anyway, a bit more of examples and documentation is surely needed in order to allow Web developers to approach the mobile environment. A Wiki could also be a good idea, to allow user contributions to make the Betavine community grow further.

How did the BV website help you?

The forums are the best place to find help and answers to technical questions, and I was actually able to solve all my doubts thanks to them.

Do you have a demo/video clip?

Not yet..

What is your favourite app/Widget on Betavine and why?

Twitware, that helps me to stay in touch with Twitter contacts.

What feature would you like to see brought to the Betavine platform/community?

A Wiki section would be great to involve more users and help them to get started with Betavine widgets.

About the platform itself, more APIs to access device and user-related informations would be great, and could surely boost the growth of widgets as a standard choice for mobile applications.

How did you hear about the Vodafone-Betavine Widget competition?

A friend, Maurizio, told me about this opportunity few days before its beginning and, after some first talks about the possible widgets to create, I’ve started writing tons of JavaScript code