Have you ever imagined to develop your mobile applications online? Or to have mobile development tools that work on any web browser on any operating system without any pre/SDK installation? Well, we have such a vision in Kuneri and released our first online mobile development tool (mobile development 2.0?) SWFPack with a press release yesterday. Value proposition is simple;

Flash Lite is the emerging mobile technology of Adobe, estimated to reach one billion devices in 2009. Content created for this technology needs to be packaged as installers for distribution. Packaging has been a hassle on Windows, and impossible on other operating systems. Kuneri’s SWFPack is a novel online service offering a cross platform, zero-install and easy to use Web 2.0 solution.

As a Symbian developer, it's been always a hassle for me to setup  S60 development environment; not to mention they only work on Windows, which I gave up some time ago as a happy Macbook user. Even after the setup, waiting projects to compile and create a SIS file annoyed me quite much: Compile 2 minutes, make small change change, compile 2 minutes argghh..

Story didn't change much after I moved to Flash Lite and started to develop applications for S60 devices. I had to create SIS installers and doing that is not much different that before; worked only on Windows and took a lot of time to generate the SIS. As Flash Lite, which is a subset of Flash, has a considerable user base on Mac OSX machines, this was a show stopper for many, unless they used virtual machines and double the setup pleasure.

This summer, we decided to change the story for Flash Lite developers and came up with a crazy idea, which turned out to be real in short time. Now, Flash Lite developers have a fast (couple seconds instead of couple minutes), easy (web browsing skills), cheap (free) and cross platform tool which saves time, nerves, money and makes things possible, as most of our other products. SWFPack not only generates SIS installers for Symbian, but will be able to create NFL for Series 40, CAB for Windows mobile and add DRM protection to content with the following releases.

SWFPack is the first milestone on our roadmap, which means we will bring more mobile development tools online. What do you think, would that change anything for mobile application developers? SWFPack is a small but exciting step, do you think mobile development could be moved completely to web? Do you know any other tool similar to that and how is their story?