Going native: Beacon Mountain

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about HTML5. I might even go so far as to say I’ve been neglecting native app development in favour of its cross platform counterpart! But for the native software developers out there, here’s an overview of Intel’s Beacon Mountain.

So what is Beacon Mountain, and how can it help native app developers? Well, for one thing, it provides productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools.

This is really useful for people who are creating apps targeting Android-based ARM and Intel Atom processor-based devices, including smartphones and tablets. It provides development environment setup and maintenance for host systems running Apple OS X (Lion v10.8.3 and up) and Microsoft Windows 7 and 8.

The key features are:

• Installation of popular Intel and third-party tools to create a development environment on the host system for writing Android applications

• Installation with just a few clicks, allowing the developer to save time and start coding right away

And the best part? It’s totally FR££. You can download Beacon Mountain v0.5 here. Bear in mind, though, that your system must have Intel Virtualisation Technology enabled in BIOS in order for Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel HAXM) to run.

If you want to know more about developing native apps with Beacon Mountain go to the Intel Developer Zone. There’s a great video on there that gives some useful demos. Enjoy going native!

• This blog post is written by Softtalkblog, and is sponsored by the Intel Developer Zone, which helps you to develop, market and sell software and apps for prominent platforms and emerging technologies powered by Intel Architecture.

For the latest Intel Developer Blogs, click here.