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The WDN Symbian DevZone... Richard Interviews Mark Lummus VP Business Development
at AppForge
by Richard Bloor, May 13, 2002
AppForge (www.appforge.com) is a familiar tool to both Palm and Pocket PC developers. It is
now bringing Visual Basic development to the Nokia 9200 Series
Communicators and is likely to be enabled for other Symbian devices in
the future. I recently spoke to Mark Lummus VP Business Development
at AppForge and in this first of a two-part interview we look at the history
of AppForge and why it has come to the Nokia Communicator.
WDN: Thanks for finding time to talk to WDN, perhaps I can start by
asking about the motivation behind the original development of
AppForge.
Mark: Well we need to go back to 1985 when Doug Armstrong created a
company called Ratio DesignLab while he was a student at the Georgia
Institute of Technology. I met Doug there and soon joined the company.
At that time we were building custom devices for other companies, with
the primary focus on embedded software and electronics. Over time we
added capabilities for industrial design and mechanical engineering so
that by the mid 90s we were developing complete products, packaging,
manuals, in fact everything you would expect to buy at a retailer.
In the late 80's we did some work for a company called Delphi
Technologies that IBM had invested in, to develop a film processing
vending kiosk. The concept was that you would go to your grocer, drop
off film at the machine, wipe through your credit card and then return 24
hours later to collect your processed film. The film would be collected,
processed off-site and returned to a series of bins where a robot picking
arm would deliver the film to a chute when you returned to pick it up.
We designed all the electronics for this. The processor was PC
compatible and we used Borland tools, Turbo Pascal, Assembler and
C++, to create our own version of DOS to run the electronics. This is
where we learnt the value of using desktop tools for embedded
development, the kernel of the idea that lead to AppForge.
A couple of years later, in 1995, we did some work for Motorola on a
small pager. We built on our experience working on the vending
machine, by adding a Basic interpreter and a graphical user interface to
our small DOS-compatible real-time operating system (RTOS). This
pager was basically an information appliance. It could receive emails,
comics and stock quotes and other useful information, displaying it in a
graphical format. This was really a technology demonstrator but
ultimately it morphed into the Pagewriter 2000. The current evolution of
this product is the Timeport or Accompli product lines, clamshell one or
two-way pagers with small keyboards.
Motorola liked the idea of using a Basic language for this type of device
and they put together their own team to specify and build this language
and a new operating system, since ours was built on an Intel
architecture. We became involved, working with them to create the IDE
into which their compiler plugged. In the process of doing that work, we
recognized that we did not want to develop IDEs preferring to leave that
to companies like Borland or Microsoft. So in 96/97 we formed a new
team to build a compiler from the ground up and a set of Active-X
controls for Microsoft Visual Basic. We then used our own compiler and
operating system to build products for our clients.
In 1998 we looked at what we were doing and could see the emerging
market for PDAs and recognized an opportunity. So we took the
development team and moved them to one side of our offices and set
them the task of commercializing the product and in April 99 we decided
to incorporate a company to focus on this technology and so AppForge
was born.
At the same time we decided to abandon consulting and focus on what
was then the leading PDA operating system, Palm. So in June 2000 we
set ourselves the goal of releasing our first version of AppForge at Palm
Source in December 2000, which we did.
WDN: Has your long involvement with this technology given you any
particular benefit?
Mark: Certainly. Back in 1995 we had this technology running on an
AMD Elan embedded 386 processor, we then switched over to a
Dragonball and ARM 7 processor in 1997. Then when Motorola came
out with M-Core, as we were working with them, we supported that also.
So our product has been multi-processor since 1995. So supporting
Pocket PC and Palm, which has been so difficult for some companies,
was a trivial exercise for us as we were doing multiple ports all along.
WDN: Who was the principal driver behind implementing AppForge for
the 9200 - AppForge or Nokia?
Mark: Nokia was very interested in bringing enterprise developers to the
Communicator, and they agreed to pay us to port our Visual Basic
technology to Symbian specifically to support the Communicator. When
we laid out our Road map a couple of years ago we knew that Symbian
was an important operating system in the wireless space. But in the
US market at that time Symbian did not have much presence, there was
limited availability of the Psion Series 5 and Revo. We met with Symbian
in 1998. While they were interested I think they were full on with their
own developments and they really wanted us to find one of the licensees
who could carry the torch. While we knew that Symbian support would
be an important milestone, we had to prioritize on what was accepted in
the market. We completed the Palm implementation and then added
Pocket PC in September 2001. During this time we had had some
informal discussions with Nokia but then in October we met with the
team driving the 9290 program here in the US. We demonstrated to
them the value of bringing over the enterprise developer, an important
group for them as this very nice device is targeted at the enterprise user.
From those discussion we agreed to support the 9200 series. We
formalized the agreement in January and made announcements at Palm
Source in February. We got to Beta in early March and are preparing to
release the final product late May or early June.
WDN: Does the relationship with Nokia mean that there is going to be
any limit on the devices AppForge will be available for?
Mark: No. Our business model is to license the Booster software to
device manufacturers. In December 2000 we entered into a license
agreement with Palm, which covers any device running on the Palm OS
using the Dragonball processor.
We have an agreement regarding the work to launch AppForge for the
9200 series but are still putting together some of the details with Nokia
so I cannot comment on what our agreement will ultimately cover. There
is a lot of discussion around the 7650 as well.
The P800 is a natural progression and we are in early discussions with
SonyEricsson. Here we not only have to address the license agreement
but also the fact that the device is a different form factor, has different
characteristics from the 9200 series and these all have to be worked
through.
The conversations we are having today are about products that you will
see in 2003, because of the cycle you need to go through, not only device
development but gaining approval from the FCC and other regulators
here in the States that can be time consuming.
Initially you will see the Booster software delivered as part of the add-on
software so it can be installed on the device from CD via your PC. Later
we would expect it to be delivered in ROM on the device.
WDN: Can in I take that to mean that you are talking to more than just
Nokia and SonyEricsson?
Mark: Yes.
WDN: Your relationship with Symbian seems to be changing, you are
now a member of the Symbian Platinum Program which gives you access
to source code. What was your motivation for joining?
The technology that AppForge provides to Symbian licensees is critical to
their success. For example, on the Nokia Communicator, we'll be
doubling the number of applications available for the Communicator in
June, and by year-end, there will be 300+ retail AppForge applications
available, and many more custom-built applications for enterprises. We
get many benefits by joining the Symbian Platinum Program. First, we
get early access to Symbian technology, which means that we can
provide support sooner. Second, we can license the source code to
Symbian OS, which means that we can achieve better integration and
support of Symbian OS. Third, we get great access to the Symbian
licensees and other partners of Symbian.
WDN: Is there any practical limit to the range of devices that you could
run on, e.g. is the 7560 too small?
Mark: No, there is really no practical limit. We have had the product
running on devices with screens as small as 160 x 120, it runs on a low
performance processor, the Dragonball, and it can run in a footprint as
low as 256Kb of flash ROM and 32Kb of RAM. In some ways this was the
advantage of starting on the Dragonball, once you can run on it there,
scaling up is easy. Coming from the embedded space we pretty much
know how to squeeze our software into a ROM.
We conclude our interview with Mark Lummus next week and discuss
some of advantages that AppForge provides to the wireless developer and
look forward to future developments in and around AppForge.
About the "WDN Symbian Guy" Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier
work was largely in design and development of commercial and
manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on
development and test management of government systems.
Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System
Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.
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