The tools leverage the Apache Cordova device APIs for developing Android, iOS, and Windows apps Credit: Larry Miller Providing an assist to mobile developers, Microsoft is offering a set of utilities for Mac OS X and Windows users to build apps with the Apache Cordova platform. The company has released Tools for Apache Cordova CLI 1.0.0, or Taco, that enable developers to build with a set of platforms and plug-ins backed by Microsoft’s Visual Studio product team. Apache Cordova features APIs enabling development of native mobile applications using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Microsoft’s tools provide command line utilities that make hybrid app development easier and faster, a Microsoft representative said. Mac OS X and Windows users can develop for Android, iOS, and Windows. Microsoft has open-sourced Taco CLI, and it is available on GitHub. Taco can be used with Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE, but does not require it. Developers can install the native Android and iOS (Mac-only) SDKs and build tools and connect to the Mac remote build server from the command line on their Windows and Linux machines, Subhag Oak, senior program manager for the Visual Studio Platform Tools team, said in the Visual Studio blog. Taco, which is available via npm requires installation of the Node.js platform for server-side JavaScript. It has gotten some recent repairs for better messaging around errors and telemetry, fixing of templates for Ionic and Visual Studio interoperability, and mending a dependency installer issue on the Mac. An issue with remote build on iOS, reported on Stack Overflow, also has been fixed. Mobile DevelopmentDevelopment Tools