Mobile technology has quickly outpaced personal computers and even laptops, creating a large and growing app market to support these devices. Smartphones and tablets are now becoming the preferred computing choice for many consumers around the world. As cloud technology continues to evolve, the need to have a computing device larger than a tablet will be pointless unless it is absolutely necessary. With global revenues of 25+ billion dollars, the market is attracting players across many different industries, including chip manufacturer Intel. The company has released the latest XDK HTML5 and JavaScript mobile development platform release focusing on Cordova plug-ins and mobile monetization.

Android (News – Alert), iOS, and Windows 8 will now get full support of Cordova APIs and plugins with the new Intel XDK. This will allow developers to take advantage of the numerous plug-ins that have been created by the developers for Cordova at plugins.cordova.io, Github, and others resources, including Google (News – Alert) Play Services for ads and in-app purchasing. 

Intel also created a new user interface (UI) to help standardized Cordova APIs in order to stipulate which plug-ins are preferred for adding to an application package when it is being built. With this new UI developers will be able to save build settings for their projects instead of entering them a single build at a time. The company has also announced it is working to add emulation capabilities of the custom plug-ins in future releases.

New API integration will make it possible to connect an app to more backend services such as Kinvey and Dropbox (News – Alert) while at the same time delivering accessibility to data feeds from different sources to add more relevant information, such as market data, location and weather.

Additional updates include:

• Support for OAuth2has, which is used by the new FourSquare and Instagram services
• Monetization opportunities through appMobi’s (News – Alert) Storeview and 1Touch
• Implementation of Cordova 3.x support for all platforms
• New UI with draggable panels
• Service Methods (from Services pane) now appear in App Designer and can be drag/dropped onto any control
• Change the UI Framework for App Designer projects in the Projects pane
• Addition of Google Maps data feed
• Firefox OS builds have been added to the Build on the Web App section of the Build Tab
• Brackets has been updated for editors along with XLint extension including HTML and Media support

• Intel (News – Alert) has also released general UI improvements to the XDK and  a number of bug-fixes are available in the release notes.