Given the immense competition between different mobile development tools, the first question that springs to mind whenever a new player enters the field is, what's different?

Naturally, most claim to facilitate titles at the flashier end of the visual scale, while also making it as easy as possible for developers to get the most out their apps.

Tom Melamed – product director of iOS and Android dev tool AppFurnace – believes checking both boxes in one dev tool is anything but easy.

As such, Melamed's own tool isn't pitched at those looking to deliver the next Infinity Blade, but rather the studios more concerned with keeping costs down and turning over a profit.

We caught up with Tom to find out why AppFurnace has been designed to keep developers in the black.

Pocket Gamer: How did AppFurnace get started?

Tom Melamed: We all used to work at Hewlett Packard European Research Center. We have years of experience working on how to make it easy for people who aren't traditional programmers to create rich mobile apps including games.

When iPhone arrived it changed everything, so when we were offered the chance to take redundancy from HP and found our own company we took it and founded Calvium.

Since then we've been building our tools, and working with organisations like Historic Royal Palaces at the Tower of London to build their first ever iPhone game.

AppFurnace seems primarily aimed at apps rather than games. What kinds of games do you envision utilising the platform?

Of our first three customers, one was a game. Of the apps we've helped to build while we were in beta, at least three were games.

While our platform isn't really appropriate for games like Angry Birds or Infinity Blade, I think that there are at least two categories of games that would be much easier to build on AppFurnace then on most other platforms.

The main type of games that AppFurnace has already successfully been used to build are location-based games - these are games that mix the physical world and the virtual to create a new kind of gaming experience. Our tools have really great location abstraction tools, which make these kind of games easy to make.

The second type of game that our tools could be really useful for are much less cool, so I'll have to whisper it - quiz games.

This is because AppFurnace has a really nice drag and drop visual editor that allows you to make really pretty screen so easily a designer could do it without any coding, or needing to install or configure any software as we are web based. It's then simply a matter of a little JavaScript to plug it all together.

Our platform has also been successfully used to create the phone part of an alternative reality game - an intern did the development in slightly over a week. That's the power of AppFurnace.

Is it fair to say AppFurnace is pitched at devs with little coding experience?

Yes, it's fair to say that most hardcore iOS coders might not see AppFurnace as their spiritual home. But we are not trying to be a stepping stone from novice to guru.

We are instead taking a different approach - we are focussing on a different segment of the creative world. I think good development is a creative process.

We are pitched at people who might associate more with design than development - people who care about the end user experience more than the language the code is written in. We have had a great response from designers and web developers who are more used to making things that others find beautiful and easy to use rather than technically rich games.

Our tools make it really easy to make beautiful stuff. For example, we have a button designer with about 40 different options on how the button looks, and we are specifically pitching at people who get excited when they hear that sort of thing - and yes you can also just use Photoshop.

But that doesn't mean that you can't flex your development muscles in AppFurnace. We have an inbuilt JavaScript editor and incorporate the Zepto and Underscore libraries for speeding things up.

In fact, some computing courses are using AppFurnace to teach how to write code as its immediacy and great emulation tools make it a great platform for that too.

Development tools are almost ten a penny on iOS and Android of late. How do you see AppFurnace standing out?

You are right - there are loads of tools out there at the moment. Some are great, some are terrible, but they all seem to fall into two main camps: the coders and the templaters. We are trying to cut a different path to app development.

The code tools like Appcelerator, Corona and PhoneGap are great for programmers - well some are better than others, given a friend of mine spent two days getting one of those set up - but I'm not getting drawn on that today.

They start you off with a blank screen and you write code to make stuff happen. If, like me, you are a programmer, that's fine. You get to make almost anything, but it's slow and you have to be a good coder with some familiarity with the language to get anything done.

The template tools are things like AppMakr and Mobile Roadie, and they make it really easy to build a specific type of app.

Some make it a 10 minute job, as long as you don't mind your app looking, feeling and behaving just like all the others built from that tool. Others give you a bit more freedom, but still within their specific niche. Just like the code based tools, for some of the people some of the time they are great, and we aren't claiming to be better than either. Just different.

Our approach is design first, right there in the tools, and then code second. We aren't trying to make it easy to build hugely complex programs, but instead we make it easy to create a beautiful app or game with great content that is totally unique and doesn't look, feel or interact like it's come from a cookie cutter pattern.

Our design first philosophy gives us a real edge when designing for both iOS and Android. We have the ability for designers to easily create anchors for their content so that it stretches and sizes sensibly on different screen sizes. It means that a cleverly crafted design can look good on all screens.

We also differentiate by having great support for sensors like location and QR codes. Both of which you can use without any coding, but you can also use them to trigger whatever code you care to write.

From your position, how easy do you think it is in general for newcomers to have a crack at smartphone development?

I think it's getting a lot easier than it was. A few years ago your choices were Objective-C or Objective-C. Now there are lots of tools and at least two platforms to realistically think about.

We have had people who aren't developers at all creating great stuff on our platform - some now public, some just used for their own testing. But we have a particular focus that isn't right for everyone or every game, and even we have loads of ideas of making it even easier and better. We have a long way to go.

More generally, I think that as hardware and compiler or interpreter performance continues to improve quickly, it’s going to be less important to be close to the metal - getting every last drop out of your hardware - and more about originality and creativity. For casual games, it’s largely already gone this way.

This frees developers up from needing to use the lowest level, most difficult languages and techniques, but the stacks, tools and libraries that support this shift aren’t all keeping up with what is now possible.

I also think that there are probably too many different sets of tools, each building their own technology stacks. I expect the problem might continue to get worse for a while, and then the weaker ones will start to fall by the wayside.

We base our technology stack on HTML5, which might not be fast enough for some things yet, but it’s surprisingly good and getting better all the time. Largely because most of our stack gets continually optimised and tuned by Apple and Google so we don't have to. We'd rather spend our time making it easy to integrate with social media than work on script compilers.

But for most developers, the real problem is what happens to their game after they've developed it. We have a system at the moment where a few apps turn into blockbusters and we all talk about them, but how many apps never recoup their development costs?

I think one place where tools can really help isn't so much in making it easy to build apps you couldn't otherwise build, but rather shrinking development costs to a sensible fraction by making it quicker to build apps in the first place.

AppFurnace is currently tooled up for cross iOS and Android development. Any plans to add additional platforms down the line?

 

Because our technology is built on top of HTML5, any mobile device with a good enough browser is a candidate, or even just the browser itself.

We are always looking at the market and responding to our customers requests. The two platforms that we are currently thinking about are iPad and mobile web, but we haven't promised either of them yet.

If Windows Phone sells as well as some people on these pages are predicating, then we could support that too.
Thanks to Tom for his time.

You can find out more about AppFurnace on the tool's website.