To better compete in the ever-changing app market, Twitter has just released Bootstrap. The social networking giant announced on a blog post this afternoon that the platform would provide a set of tools using CSS and HTML conventions to create applications.
Originally developed during Twitter-organized Hackweek, the standards have been perfected since. Now, Twitter says, they will have a consistent framework for developing applications going forward.
At its core, Bootstrap is simply CSS, but built with Less, an easy-to-use pre-processor that provides more power and flexibility than standard CSS. With Less, a range of features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions become available.
The post also noted two important benefits:
“Bootstrap remains very easy to implement; just drop it in your code and go. Compiling Less can be accomplished via Javascript, an unofficial Mac application, or via Node.js.
Second, once complied, Bootstrap contains nothing but CSS, meaning there are no superfluous images, Flash, or Javascript. All that remains is simple and powerful CSS for your web development needs.”
This is all part of Twitter’s renewed efforts to engage dialogue and standards with developers; it’s not as if they had trouble getting app development going before. They just didn’t have standards.
Over one million registered third-party apps, built by more than 750,000 developers, exist around the world. Every 1.5 seconds a new app is created.
