iPhone Developer's Journal

Called TapLynx, the downloadable framework will save organizations the high cost of custom iPhone development and significantly increase the productivity of professional app developers.

TapLynx lets designers and developers create truly unique iPhone media applications with customized content and their own distinctive look and feel simply by filling out a configuration file. The framework is optimized for presenting the latest content (through standard RSS feeds), including text, images and video, all viewed inline within the application. The framework also supports multiple ad formats and servers to monetize content. Users of the app can easily share the content with their Facebook, e-mail and Twitter followers. All apps work equally well on the iPod Touch.

All Things Digital, Variety.com and NewsGator itself have apps built on TapLynx. It's the foundation of NetNewsWire, NewsGator's acclaimed iPhone feed reader.

"Slice of Lime, our design agency, downloaded TapLynx and created the TechStars iPhone app (coming soon) in a matter of days," said David Cohen, CEO and executive director of the TechStars mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. "Slice of Lime spent that time focusing on design and look and feel, not coding. Creating an iPhone app with TapLynx seemed as simple as setting up an iGoogle page."

TapLynx is a breakthrough for designers, developers, agencies, bloggers or any organization trying to harness the iPhone's soaring popularity. Mobile apps are a $2.4 billion per year business on the App Store, according to AdMob. Apple shipped 13.7 million iPhones in 2008 and another 5.2 million in the first three months of 2009. iPhone and iPod Touch applications on the iTunes App Store more than doubled between January and July, when the count topped 65,000.

Brad Feld, managing director of venture capital firms Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital (a NewsGator investor) adds, "Slice of Lime used their design expertise and TapLynx to create the Foundry Group iPhone app in less than a week. TapLynx boosted Slice of Lime's productivity by eliminating the need for its developers to create the app from the ground up."

TapLynx is available for download at http://www.taplynx.com. It's free to evaluate. Once an app is ready for production, users need only purchase a license key to activate it. The Enterprise Package is $3,499 and includes up to 16 customizable tabs, customizable colors and graphics, photo galleries, Twitter/Facebook connectivity, search and video content.

"TapLynx makes iPhone apps as easy to create as they are to conceive," said Daniel Feld, chief operating officer of Slice of Lime, a Webby award winning Web development firm and NewsGator's TapLynx launch partner. "Developing one shouldn't have to be rocket science, and now it isn't."

"Mobile computing is an important part of NewsGator's larger role as the social computing company," added TapLynx creator Brent Simmons, NewsGator's architect, client products. "iPhone apps are the biggest thing in mobile computing, and we've made it easy for anyone to get on the platform now."