Gluon Mobile 1.0 Released

Welcome to ‘client week’ at Gluon! If last week was all about the cloud (and the week before all about open source), this week will be all about client-side technology coming out of Gluon.

This week starts with a bang – we are pleased to announce the immediate release and availability of Gluon Mobile 1.0. The development of Gluon Mobile 1.0 has been 10 months in the making – we started Gluon Mobile in earnest back in January 2015, and what a road it has been! After a small number of developer preview releases, and a lot of developer feedback, we have the very first ‘official’ release of Gluon Mobile.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with Gluon Mobile, it is a client-side library that tackles three things:

1. Enabling cross-device applications that can easily move between desktop, mobile, and embedded devices with a consistent, modern, and stylish ‘material design’ user interface.
2. Making it trivial to access hardware features of various mobile devices in a device-agnostic fashion.
3. Making cloud connectivity and synchronization invisible and automatic.

While we know there is always more that can be done in all three of these areas, we are incredibly proud of our progress so far, and believe that Gluon Mobile is sufficiently far advanced, and user tested, to make the 1.0 designation official.

Way back in May we released this teaser video:

Since then Gluon Mobile has come a long way – it has grown into a polished library in use by many developers (both the free version and the commercial product). We have published a number of blog posts since that release, and we have shown a number of screenshots. Below are some of the screenshots from Gluon Mobile (in particular, the Glisten UI library) that have been taken over the last few months (so, in various states of completeness):

Of course, it is very important to note that these screenshots only really show the ‘material design’ functionality of Gluon Mobile, and doesn’t really show off the other useful functionality. We have an application framework, cloud connectivity, device-agnostic APIs for using hardware, and much more!

What’s New in Gluon Mobile 1.0?
Gluon Mobile has had four developer preview releases (in June, August, and twice in September). Since the Gluon Mobile developer preview 4 release, the main new features in Gluon Mobile 1.0 are:

1. A final, polished API that is battle-hardened from a lot of usage (both by Gluon engineers in consulting projects, as well as by end users).
2. The Charm Connect module has had a barrage of use cases fired at it, and it now works really real for communicating and synchronizing between multiple clients and the Gluon Cloud.
3. The Charm Down module has been started – it now enables developers to access hardware functionality in a device-agnostic way. More functionality will be added (by ourselves and the community – Charm Down is an open source project) as demand is made more obvious.
4. The Charm Glisten module makes great strides towards full ‘Material Design’ support. As time progresses the gap will continue to close even further.

It should be noted that all along Gluon has described Gluon Charm as an extremely agile product, which is why it is released under the subscription model. Our engineering team will be putting out releases frequently, and these releases will include new features and bug fixes. If you use a build tool with dependency management (we recommend Gradle), then you can automatically come along for the ride as part of your build environment, always benefiting from the very latest improvements.

What’s Next?
In the very near future (perhaps you should set your alarms for ~24 hours) we will have another blog post covering a number of sample applications that we have developed to demonstrate the functionality of Gluon Mobile. We hope that these samples will fill in a major missing piece of the puzzle, allowing for you to quickly get up and running.

As always, Gluon Mobile is available in the Gluon Store right now for purchase.