Have you ever wanted to create an iPhone app, but can’t code your way out of a wet paper bag? Users of NewsGator’s NetNewsWire iPhone news reader will have to wait a little longer for the next version of that application because its creator, Brent Simmons, has been busy working on a new iPhone framework called TapLynx. The goal of TapLynx is to help users generate topic-focused media applications for the iPhone without any programming required. The first application, created by Simmons, has already been built for All Things Digital.
Fans of NetNewsWire who have been patiently waiting for an updated version shouldn’t have to wait too much longer. The next generation of the NetNewsWire iPhone app, which promises to have added functionality like the ability to mark news items as unread and send articles to Instapaper, is said to be based on TapLynx.
According to NewsGator’s Brent Simmons:
“The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.
But you can do programming if you want to — use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that’s what I’m doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone — it’s a custom app built on TapLynx.)”
Being able to rapidly develop customizable and unique iPhone apps with no need to learn Cocoa is great news to those of us who are interested in building such apps, but know very little about developing them. We are anxiously awaiting for TapLynx to make its way out of beta, but meanwhile you can sign up for the SDK here and the company will let us know when it becomes available. Be sure to follow @taplynx on Twitter.
