Lots of fun hacking this last weekend at the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon in Seattle! Even with the sunny weekend, a rarity in Seattle, there was a fantastic turnout that included a lot of junior high and high school students and even a robotics team that built a mobile phone controlled taco RC car!

It’s finally here! The Mozilla Foundation released BrowserQuest on March 28^th, a 2D adventure game built entirely on HTML5, Javascript and other Open Source languages. Unlike other HTML5-based games, which focus on social turn-based gaming, BrowserQuest is a massive multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game that is reminiscence of Nintendo’s Zelda or Pokémon franchises. While this browser game is a huge step forward in HTML5 mobile gaming development, challenges persist.

BrowserQuest uses the Websockets API  to allow users to chat within the browser by offering a full duplex communication channel operating through a single socket over the Web. This allows users to take full advantage of the game while generating far less network traffic. Due to the use of Websockets, the game currently only runs on Firefox for Android and Mobile Safari on mobile devices, and Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera (provided you enable WebSockets) full browsers.

A recent article by PC World highlights some interesting statistics that were found in a joint survey from IDC and Appcelerator that queried 2,173 developers between Jan. 25 and Jan. 27: Seventy-nine percent of mobile developers report they will integrate HTML5 in their apps this year.

As more and more developers plan to use HTML5, there is growing alarm regarding the variations in how content is rendered in different browsers. “Appcelerator keeps track of how HTML5 is implemented on browsers that visit its Web site, and comparing a large number of variables, there is a 20 percent to 30 percent difference in how different browsers consume content.” So while HTML5 may seem promising to many developers, fragmentation poses some serious challenges.

Smartphones + HTML5 + AT&T APIs + Sencha Touch = Killer Web Apps

HTML5 makes developing mobile apps a lot easier, leading to a new age of rich mobile web applications.

Recently, James Pearce from Sencha joined Elle Tabares to talk about using HTML5 to build rich mobile web apps in an informative webcast.  Members of the AT&T Developer Program can watch the archived webcast, and download the video and slides. 

Interested in finding out how the Boston Mobile App Hackathon turned out? 

What happened at the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon in Dallas on 11/5?