Adding a downloadable app capability to the car isn't just a matter of bolting consumer-grade technology onto an automotive hardware platform, dusting your hands, and calling it a day.
Apps should be integrated into the vehicle experience, which means they need access to vehicle resources. But you must carefully control that access: the apps should be isolated in their own environment to protect the rest of the car software. Most of all, the apps need to conform to safe driving practices, which typically entails a re-write of the user interface.
Still, we should leverage as much as possible from the mobile world. That’s where the real innovation happens; the mobile community provides a much bigger pool of fresh ideas than automakers could ever build by themselves. And the best tools and libraries are focused on mobile development.
That’s why QNX Software Systems is building the best of both: an application tool that draws heavily from mobile, but is adapted to the car. It's provisionally named the HTML5 SDK for the QNX CAR application platform and, while it isn't yet available to the public, beta versions are now available for QNX CAR platform customers.
For a preview of what we’ll be rolling out, check out this video:
Related Posts
Report from Barcelona: first meeting of the W3C automotive business group
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the first face-to-face meeting of the W3C automotive bus[...]
Pandora interview: Using HTML5 to deliver content to the car
At CES this year, our own Andy Gryc had a chance to sit down with Tom Conrad, CTO at Pandora, a long[...]
Finally, I can throw away my 8 tracks
Okay, maybe I'm not old enough to have owned 8-track tapes. But I do remember that my uncle had an 8[...]
Jamming on a theme of connectivity at Automotive Megatrends 2013
Justin Moon"The only time I really don’t feel connected is when I am driving in my car.” You can al[...]
The challenge of creating an (auto)mobile user experience
On March 12, I had the honor of joining a distinguished group of panelists at a luncheon for the Los[...]