Drifty was part of this spring’s TechStars 2013 class out of Geekdom right here in San Antonio. This week we’ll highlight not one, but two awesome apps by Drifty as part of our Must Have App series. I recently sat down with founders Ben Sperry and Max Lynch to learn more about Drifty and the cloud technology behind the apps.

Clean, Functional Websites And Apps

The first app, called Codiqa, is a drag-and-drop interface-building tool for creating mobile websites and apps with jQuery Mobile. Codiqa exports production-ready HTML5 of whatever a user creates, saving them the time and effort it normally takes to do it by hand, and allowing them to skip the wireframing step altogether.

Jetstrap, the second app by Drifty, is similar, but focuses on empowering users to create responsive desktop websites with the popular HTML5 framework, Twitter Bootstrap. After drag-and-dropping a Bootstrap design, users can also export clean HTML5 of anything they build.

Codiqa and Jetstrap are the tools you’ve been coveting for quick, easy to create mobile sites and apps in the cloud.

The Cloud Behind The App

Both tools are essentially powerful Javascript/HTML/CSS applications that interact with servers through a REST API. Drifty developed the client-side and the backend separately, which makes it easy to plug the technology into different environments (such as a desktop app, for example). On the backend the apps use Python and CoffeeScript in the browser.

Friends Become Entrepreneurs

Max and Ben began working on the idea for Codiqa back in the summer of 2011. At the time, both were still working full-time jobs, like many new entrepreneurs, and spending afternoons and nights building the beta version of the tool. They created a landing page to capture leads and contact info to see if there was a need for these tools. “As it turned out, there were a lot of people interested in what we were building, and by the time we launched our private beta in January 2012, we had over 1,000 people signed up,” according to Sperry.

Codiqa (click to enlarge):

Sperry commented that early adopters offered an immense amount of feedback and support during the private beta. The two hustled to fix a long list of bugs, and to add some much needed features before releasing the product for everyone. In February 2012, Codiqa launched publicly, and gained over 10,000 users in the first month when jQuery Mobile spotlighted a free version of the tool on its homepage.

Since then, the two have grown the user-base and profits to the point where they no longer needed full-time jobs, and in August 2012 they became full on entrepreneurs with the launch of their second cloud product, Jetstrap.

Jetstrap (click to enlarge):

Web Development Made Easy

A person looking to build a mobile app or website can sign up for one of the tools and start building an idea with the easy drag-and-drop interface. Both apps come with the standard mobile and desktop component features, such as buttons, navbars, checkboxes, etc., which can be added and reordered with ease. When a user has a design built the way they want it, they can simply export the clean, standards compliant HTML5 file that’s ready to go live. Drifty’s products also have a live HTML/CSS/JS editor for people who wish to customize their apps even further within the tool.

“We’ve built innovative drag-and-drop tech and real-time HTML editing that updates your interface as you type, making it easy to pick your desired level of control: drag-and-drop for fast layouts, and HTML editing for small details,” said Sperry.

The next time you need to mock up a site or develop a mobile app, Drifty tools will help you take your vision to reality; Drifty works to make web development easy with Codiqa and Jetstrap.

Check back each week as we highlight a new Must Have App. If you missed last week, take a look at our previous Must Have App: drchrono.

If you’re a startup running on Rackspace and would like to be part of this series, let us know and we’ll set up a time to talk and learn more about your awesome app.

We also offer insight into how to take advantage of horizontal scaling in the cloud. By integrating your app with the open cloud API, it can now control the hosting infrastructure to spin up and down servers as needed. And since our cloud is open, you never have to worry about your app getting locked in.

Up your game with Rackspace – we got your back.

We had a full house of 30 or so Appium hackers ranging from the Appium-curious to those who have Appium code imprinted in their cerebral cortex. And participants were not limited to the just Bay Area — we had a couple folks get in on the action from remote locations via a G+ hangout, something we hope to encourage in the future. There was even a real, live, bona fide Appium robot in the house, courtesy of Dan Cuellar from Zoosk.com – one of the Tapster robots that holds a pen and controls a physical mobile device via Appium.

Hackathons are one way we at Rackspace encourage and promote a strong open-source community as well as strong testing practices for the software development world.  Appium was built to make it easy to test any native mobile application in the same way the Selenium allows us to test web browsers.  We hope that by employing the Webdriver API from the start and not requiring any extra compilation for testing, Appium will help unite the testing community around mobile testing in a way that does not currently exist.

One sign that it was a successful event was that everyone who attended learned or achieved something.  Testers who needed a leg up installing Appium successfully saw their application automated.  On the other end of the spectrum, we had some lively discussion around Fruitstrap and iDeviceInstaller for automated installs of mobile apps to mobile devices, as well as some prodding and probing of the Instruments binary for possible parallel execution of tests.

As organizers and co-hosts of the event, we gained a new appreciation for the interest surrounding Appium.  “It’s really exciting to see so much enthusiasm,” said lead Appium developer Jonathan Lipps, “we really believe that this tool will make a difference, and it’s encouraging to see that others think so too.”

With the response that we received from this first hackathon, we plan to hold another.  If you want to join us next time, here are some ways to hear about the event:

• Join the Discussion List
• Join the IRC channel #appium on irc.freenode.net
• Watch this very blog
• Visit the official Sauce Labs blog
• Visit the official Appium blog
• Check out Rackspace’s Twitter stream

Regardless of where you are or what your interest level is in Appium, we welcome everyone to join in the fun.

Here’s one of the times I was on stage this week at the NextConf in Berlin: http://nextberlin.eu/2013/04/robert-scobel-google-glasses/ Very cool seeing Bruce Sterling, famous science fiction author, again. We had him on stage to try out Google Glass.

Several people wonder why Rackspace pays me to talk about Google and Google Glass and what giving a keynote about the Age of Context (that video is here: http://nextberlin.eu/2013/04/robert-scoble-the-age-of-context/ ) has to do with my duties at Rackspace; especially when Rackspace, OpenStack and even cloud computing rarely come up in the conversations.

I’ll tell you why. Topics like Google Glass and the Age of Context are new kinds of conversation starters. They will have huge impacts on Rackspace and its business in coming years. It’s the same reason I go out and talk to small five-person startups. There are new technologies emerging every second powered by companies of all sizes, and these technologies are driving change. It’s my job to get the word out about new advances, whether from small companies like Chartio and Tellagence, or large ones like Google (which often get the most attention). Google Glass is one of these game-changing advances.

Here’s some of what we’re seeing:

1. Google Glass already has a ton of developer interest. When I spoke at BetaWorks (which just bought Instapaper) I saw it. At Google IO, more than half the audience laid down $1,500 to buy a pair. Etc., etc.

2. Google Glass is going to drive the need for a new kind of cloud computing and Google won’t be able to satisfy all the demand. If Google Glass is as big a deal as I think it will be, humans will generate much more data than they do today; either because of sensor tracking to do things like play location-based games, or do health tracking or more. Think about Waze, a traffic app, on Google Glass. These new developers and their new apps will need new cloud computing. Plus, I see Glass as part of a contextual system, one that uses an Internet of Things, but also brings data from your own businesses in along with Big Data computation that will find new patterns to display on our Glass.

3. Rackspace has always been on the bleeding edge – it successfully given birth to OpenStack, which now has more than 800 companies participating – and it is looking for the next thing. If it finds it, our meteoric growth will continue for the next decade. Which is why Rackspace, along with a dozen other sponsors, funded me and Shel Israel to write a book about the contextual future coming at us quickly.

It’s getting clearer and clearer to me that the future is contextual systems. Rackspace, if it executes well, should be a leader in providing infrastructure for these systems. If not, shame on us; but at least we knew where the goal line was because of the conversations we’ve been having with developers, analysts and press about Google Glass.

4. This is a new form of marketing, one that has Rackspace in listening mode. It is also a front-row seat on what people expect to do with these things. I’m already passing that info back to executives so we can make sure we have products and services ready to go to support the developers of the future.

A Big Data revolution is underway. I’m already carrying 20-plus sensors at any given time thanks to my cell phones, my Google Glass, my Basis health monitor and a few other devices. That number keeps going up. The data streaming off these things is quite different than the data that, say, Oracle was written for (which was mostly banking and business data, which is why relationships was so important back then). In this world a constant flow of data is streaming off of us, our cars, our homes, our businesses and it’s going to increase exponentially. That’s forcing all sorts of database innovation from MongoDB to FoundationDB to Firebase, and others.

Rackspace needs to make some tough strategic choices to make sure it stays on the bleeding edge, which is where the profits are. Luckily, we’re betting hard on open source and great service where our competitors are betting on lock-in. But that will change due to customer demand and I’m pushing executives and developers inside of Rackspace to retool and rethink our data strategies.

Developers are going to need a lot of flexibility in this new world. Some might want to put a cloud server inside newer smartphones. Can Amazon or Google do that? OpenStack could. How about if a new company serving Google Glass doesn’t want to use Rackspace, but wants to control its own servers to use some new ARM processors, or something that Rackspace doesn’t offer? Open Source gives that developer that kind of flexibility. Neither Google, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft give developers that kind of “take your cloud anywhere” flexibility.

But, really, this keeps us thinking like a startup. In fact, just yesterday three new apps were sent to me by developers and, in my email now, there’s two more. Keep in mind that most of the 8,000 Google Glasses sold so far still haven’t even shipped!

The truth is that these new apps might become companies. The only time they are going to really be open to discussing cloud computing choices is right now. In a year they will be too busy scaling their businesses. So, we want to have discussions with those new businesses today so that they pick the right cloud computing platform and don’t get locked into something that will limit their growth in 18 months (or cost them a lot of money to either trade out, or code around).

That’s why Rackspace is paying me to go around the world studying the bleeding edge of the Internet, whether it be medical sensors, Google Glass or new kinds of apps like Moves.

Coming up, I’ll be at Google IO, BetaDay (BetaWorks’ learning day) in New York (May 16th), LeWeb in London (early June) and lots of other places. Drop by, say “hi.” I’ll let you try my Google Glasses. I’ll setup a time when I’m in San Francisco soon for you to come by and think about the future with us.

Let’s continue the conversation. What are you building? What do you need to make a contextual startup?

By the way, this is a Rackspace ad I shot in a Lufthansa plane this week with my Google Glass. Sort of meta.

While there are multiple definitions, from the perspective of our team, we advocate and practice the philosophy of DevOps every day as we work to build Rackspace products and make sure they run smoothly. We are passionate about open source and are building on OpenStack, solving challenging problems at scale. Adhering to the DevOps philosophy in our everyday work is all about breaking down barriers, and we wouldn’t be successful any other way. Developers, Operators, Quality, Product, Security – we all work hand in hand to build our products and make them successful.  All of these roles have to work together to get the products we build out the door at the speed we are working to deploy them to meet customers’ needs. Automation and monitoring are huge parts of that, but the biggest piece has been a shift in the way the teams are structured – to all work together towards a common goal. We still have work to do, but DevOps is now a part of our culture. As a Racker, it is awesome to work in a collaborative environment that supports this.

I manage a Cloud Engineering team across Austin, San Antonio and remote. Months ago, when we found out that DevOpsDays was coming back to Austin, we started planning this as a team outing. In addition to team building, it provided an opportunity for us to learn, contribute, network and hopefully convince a few folks how awesome it is to be a Racker. As sponsors of the event, we also gave out $200 free Rackspace Cloud trial accounts to attendees.

Today, we have engineers across almost 20 time zones, and we are hiring – everywhere. I couldn’t agree more with Pete Cheslock, Director of DevTools at Dyn and a DevOps evangelist, who titled his keynote “Talent First, Location Second.”

Four Rackers presented Ignite talks during the event (these are five-minute talks limited to 15 seconds per slide – a standard format at DevOps days):

• Paul Voccio, Director of Software Development, spoke about how to deploy to 10,000 nodes simultaneously .
• Nick Silkey, Linux Engineer, shared his experiences about how to level up from ops to engineer. “Be the automator, not the automated,” he said.
• Jesse Gonzalez, Linux Engineer, spoke about a common challenge we face with NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
• Everett Toews, Developer Advocate, shared our recent progress with our Cloud SDKs and how to make OpenStack and Rackspace Cloud easier to use for developers and operators.

Everything was recorded and according to DevOpsDays it will be up for viewing soon. Copies of all the ignite talk presentations are available now: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bp6uux89z8bfyn6/DevOpsDaysAustin2013-Slides.zip

In a conversation with Matt Ray, Technical Evangelist with Opscode, he mentioned that in a recent university class he attended, they were still teaching waterfall methodology. Crazy. I could not imagine trying to do half of the things we’re doing now that way. In order to increase velocity you can’t throw things over the wall, you all have to work together from the beginning. The shift towards DevOps grew out of this tearing down the silos. It is clear to me now that your business will be left behind and innovation will be critically hindered in today’s fast-paced climate without adopting DevOps practices.

For us at Rackspace, there are a few principles we believe are critical to a DevOps culture:

• Giving everyone an equal seat at the table
• Understand each other’s perspectives. Opening the dialogue.
• Sharing is caring; and sharing more re-usable parts is love.

We definitely need more developers attending this conference. I fully agree with Dell Principal Cloud Solution Architect Rob Hirschfeld who wrote that “we’ve got a lot of operators who are engaging with developers and fewer developers who are engaging with operators (the “opsdev” people).” Developers – this is a call to action!

To highlight the importance of developers and operators working together from the beginning, our compute engineering team came up with this Haiku:

writing code is hard
if you cannot deploy it
it does not matter

The DevOps mentality shift is something that our customers are also grappling with as they seek to develop innovative new products and applications and keep their businesses competitive. To quote our own Cloud Evangelista, Niki Acosta, “It’s the stuff that happens at the top of our stack, but it’s also the stuff that makes our stack possible.”

The importance of operating this way is becoming more and more evident. And enterprises are starting to take notice. DevOps will shape businesses. To sum up Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, “Every company these days is an IT company.” Enterprises will need to use DevOps practices to streamline IT and become their own innovation centers. The cultural change is just the first step.

For more on DevOps, check out the Rackspace DevOps Blog.

The first set of tools in our arsenal allows the .NET community to develop and consume cloud features or services. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET and Rackspace’s PowerClient help you utilize common cloud features for development. Additionally, you can use tools like these for management of production environments using Windows Server platforms running on a Rackspace hosted infrastructure. You don’t have to use the PowerClient or the SDK to make the APIs work; we just recommend it when you’re using a platform requiring API calls to the Rackspace Cloud.

The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET SDK helps you build web and mobile applications that streamline your Windows cloud strategy. Meanwhile, Rackspace’s PowerClient offers a Powershell-based API client for the Rackspace public cloud and works with our next-generation Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack.

For developers who’d like to start developing for the Rackspace Cloud right away with no additional software licensing costs, you can download a free copy of Visual Web Developer Express 2012 from Microsoft. The Rackspace SDK for .NET can then be downloaded from within this development tool using the integrated NuGet extension manager

For more information about the Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET library, let’s take a peek under the hood.

What is the Cloud SDK for Microsoft .NET?

The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft .NET is written for the Microsoft .NET platform and designed to enable developers to work seamlessly with the many services provided by the OpenStack cloud operating system.

The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET contains:

• A language API
• Getting Started Guide
• API Reference Manual
• Release Notes
• Sample code

The following features are available in Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET

• Cloud Identity
• Cloud Servers
• Cloud Block Storage
• Cloud Files
• Cloud Networks

For a feature matrix and available functionalities, please check out our release notes in the Major Releases section.

Before using the SDK you will need the following:

• A Rackspace Cloud account
• One of the following combinations: username/password or username/API key for authentication
• Windows 7 or higher
• Microsoft .Net Framework 4
• Visual Studio 2010 or higher

That’s all you need to get started with the Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET. Now you can start seamlessly and easily integrating your applications into your Windows cloud environments.

To learn more, see www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/windows/.

In this new series we’re shining a spotlight on the latest and greatest apps developed by Rackspace friends, partners and Rackspace Startup Program members, so you know they’re awesome! We’re here to make it easier for you to weed through all the apps out there and focus on those that are truly remarkable and changing the way we interact with technology.

Look for a new blog post each week where we’ll take an inside look at the idea behind the innovation. Then, be sure to check out the Rackspace Facebook page, Google + community, YouTube channel and even Instagram throughout the week for more details. We’ll share live interviews with the app founders, stories about their inspiration and a background profile on each startup.  We’re here to help you spread your story.

Join us on Monday, May 6 when we’ll highlight our very first App of the Week.

If you’re a startup running on Rackspace and would like to be part of this series, let us know and we’ll set up a time to talk and learn more about your awesome app.

One of the ways we engage in promoting a strong development community is with Hackathons. For the uninitiated, a hackathon is an event where developers get together and work on a particular technical subject for a defined period of time — usually with plentiful pizza and beer to grease the wheels of innovation. The outcome might be some amazing new tool or feature, or it could just be a good time with other like-minded people learning about the possibilities.

Next week we’re excited to host a hackathon with our friends at Sauce Labs for their burgeoning mobile testing tool, Appium. Just like Selenium has empowered developers to automate browser testing, Appium aims to implement the Webdriver protocol for native mobile applications. At Rackspace we’re particularly excited about the possibility of mobile testing with a familiar, open source DSL with a strong community already surrounding it.  You can find more information on the specifics of Appium on its site: http://appium.io.

Come and join the festivities! Whether you’re deeply familiar with Appium, Webdriver and automated testing, or just looking to get a leg up on using the tool, this is the place to be:

Appium Hackathon @ Rackspace with Sauce Labs
Thursday, May 2, 2013 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. (PDT)
Rackspace SF Office
620 Folsom St. #100
San Francisco, CA 94107
RSVP Here!

This hackathon is open to anybody who wants to attend — just RSVP here at the Eventbrite page.

Rackspace Cloud customers get free Cloudability monitoring for all of their Rackspace spend, as well as up to $2,500 of cost monitoring for non-Rackspace accounts. In the screencast below, I walk you through how to quickly setup Cloudability for your cloud configuration.

Cloudability can automatically email you daily reports of your cloud spending across a multitude of cloud services, and Cloudability has an easy way to view your historic server spends at a quick glance. The tool can give you an estimate for the month and compare it to previous spend. You are also able to breakdown the costs by cloud account and vendor. You can also set up a monthly budget, where you can automatically receive an email if you get near, or exceed, your server budget.

Cost monitoring is very important in this day and age, and with the advanced tools that Cloudability offers, you’ll be able to clearly understand and monitor your cloud spending.

Create Hype

Prior to launch, try creating some hype. Create some teaser videos that show all that your app can do. Use those amazing design and development skills to create a splash page for your app. The splash page can include links to all of your social media, videos and demos of your app.

Be Social

Social is powerful tool and can be used to market your app in a variety of ways. Tell your friends and tell those friends to tell their friends. If you don’t have the biggest social following, you may want to call in your favors and partner with someone who does. Tweet, share and pin about the need your app fills and how your solution works.

Social can also be used within your app. Case studies have shown that having users log-in with Facebook means more shares and a higher rate of challenges for mobile games.

Beta Test

Beta testing is where marketing and development come together. Beta testing is a good way to get feedback from users before the app launches which will help your app to get better ratings and reviews post-launch. It can also create advocates for your app. Your beta testers can help get the word out about your app.

ASO Is The New SEO

Just when you thought search engine optimization (SEO) was dying out, it’s been reincarnated into mobile with App Store Optimization (ASO). Thankfully, ASO strategies are similar to those of SEO, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. While little is known about the algorithm used to determine rank within the app store, we do know that keywords, categorization, ratings, downloads and uninstalls can all be factors.

Use the Google Adwords keywords tool to try out all of the keywords for your app and pick the best ones for your title, content and metas. See what keywords the top apps in your category use in their title and content. Make sure the most important keywords appear in the beginning of your text.

Or if you don’t want to do it yourself, there are also tools and services coming out on a daily basis to help with this endeavor.

Ratings, Reviews And Rank

Ratings and reviews are vital to the success of your app. Not only are they important to rank in the app store, but people are more likely to download apps with more positive reviews.

Yet studies show that less than 0.1 percent of downloads actually result in a rating or review. So what’s the best way to get reviews (and good reviews at that)? One case study showed that not only prompting the user helped, but asking them how they felt about the app first dramatically increased the number of reviews. This particular case study, run for the Kodak gallery Android app, used a local prompt within the app to determine whether users liked the app before asking them if they would rate the app within the market. Only the users that liked or loved the app were shown the prompt to rate in the market. This method yielded 56 percent more reviews than a market review prompt alone.

Now, this doesn’t mean that every app that prompts users will get more reviews. Users need to like your app for this to work; which is why it’s also important to listen to your reviews and make adjustments.