Archive for the ‘mobile’ Category
February 26th, 2010During a very intense week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and a lot of very interesting meetings, discussions and talks, one incident surprisingly stuck out. At one of the evening events, I randomly met the folks behind http://www.yourappshop.com, a platform which allows you to distribute iPhone applications through other means than the official Apple app store – you don’t need a jailbroken iPhone as you need when using alternative app stores such as Cydia. But before I explain in more detail what they are doing lets have a look at the current app store hype.
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February 15th, 2010Lately we have been quite active around a mobile app, which you can find in multiple app stores for multiple platforms. The app runs on iPhone, Android, Palm’s WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia S60, Vodafone 360 phones and we are still adding to the list. But the most interesting fact is: it’s all the same code, just one and the same app. For making it work on all the platforms we just had to wrap, build, deploy and package it using the right combination of tools for the right platform. By adding a bit of UI sugar (mostly CSS) the app looks native and can reach a much wider audience for a much lower cost than ever possible before.
January 25th, 2010During the Oredev speakers dinner last November, I was having an interesting discussion about the car industry and how Google in one swipe mangled up the turn-to-turn navigation market. During this discussion and other interesting conversations at the following JsConf, it it became more and more clear that we (web developers) should be able to write applications for instance for cars, write applications for phones we can plug into cars, and write those applications using web technologies – meaning JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
November 27th, 2009
In a recent project a client asked for boxes with rounded corners and filled with a gradient; within an application targeted at smartphones.
On mobile devices it is important to keep things simple, for instance to keep the number of DOM nodes low. That rules out using additional elements for the corners. On the other hand, many mobile devices are featuring recent versions of web rendering engines. Dive into CSS 3.
Modern web development techniques offer a lot of possibilities to render boxes with rounded corners: e.g. border-radius, border-image, or SVG used as background. In this post I’m going to explore the support for them across different devices and runtime environments. You can skip to the results table if all you want is a quick overview.
As stated above, I want to achieve a box with rounded corners and a gradient that reaches from top to bottom, scaling to the height of the box. The example might be simple, but it is representing a common design goal.
August 12th, 2009August 9th was the day for the first Dojo event in Israel and thanks to Yoav Rubin from IBM Research Labs in Haifa, we were able to hold the event in the great Auditorium of the amazingly located IBM building in Haifa.
To give you a little impression of what kind of working environment the folks at IBM have, I uploaded a panorama image from Yoav’s office.
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June 23rd, 2009Today was the first day of the Internet World here in Munich. It is accompanied by RIA World and Mobile Vision, so you get three conferences at once. Unfortunately their schedules are not synchronized, pretty uncomfortable. This event is a mix of conference and fair. You can find and talk to a lot of (mostly) german companies and get all the infos you need. And on the other hand you can get some information about those three topics in the talks at the conference. And as usual the beer at the after-party is for free, even for those who are only there to see the fair and don’t have to pay, as I understood it. So come for a free beer :-).
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June 22nd, 2009At first we have to thank the organizers, it was a great event. Especially the developer day (~100 people) was so loaded with energy, ideas and enthusiasm – wow that was huge! It took place in Barcelona Activa a business incubator, obviously well known throughout Barcelona, the Taxi driver knew right away where to go. The offices in there looked like you wanted to work there, the style of the house was so interesting that I even walked the entire floor once, because everything was so open and felt constructive. If you want to move your business to Barcelona try it out. And this was of course the perfect place for the mobile developer day, a young and constantly exploring group of people, pushing the limits and full of energy to move the mobile web forward. The parties afterwards had been as inspiring and great for getting to know people as they had been fun.
The conference day was just as interesting and though it was also a pretty cosy atmosphere (I would say about 250 people) one felt the difference to the day before, it was more on the business level but always mixed with the understanding for the young mobile industry it’s technical hurdles and the rough edges it still has, it was perfect too. Having tapas under the spanish sun was just as perfect as the content and the people there. The range of topics, no matter if in a panel or solo had been amazing and I am sure that everyone heard something interesting. For all the slides, and hopefully some videos watch the mobile2.0 site, pics are as usual on flickr.
The next mobile2.0 will probably be in San Francisco around October. See you there …
June 16th, 2009We have been writing and talking about EventNinja already for a bit. Now you can have it! Just visit EventNinja.net and test it on your iPhone and other mobile devices. EventNinja is on its way into the different AppStores and we will keep you updated on new versions coming out.
What will you get? At first, you’re getting the best app out there to lead you around a conference like the mobile2.0 in Barcelona in a few days on the 18th and 19th of June 2009. If you are attending be sure to have EventNinja on your mobile! So that you have all the info at hand when searching for the next talk to attend. It’s not just a list of all relevant upcoming web developer events on your phone (and browser). It is even more, you can get in depth info about the events, their schedule, all the twitter messages for an event, directions and many more features.
If you are at the mobile2.0 be sure to visit us to get even more!
Enjoy the short video we prepared to give you an impression of what EventNinja can do
June 10th, 2009On the 18th of May I attended the WebMontag that took place here in Munich. It was an interesting mix of (short) talks ranging from augmented reality, digital art (innovative UIs), podcamp, a too long discussion about twitter and it’s use inside corporations, to various marketing talks for companies and their services, and ending all this with a short (the most tech-related talk) I gave about our cloud-based (not only mobile) widget EventNinja.
The venue (Pressecenter der Messe München) was not really in the city center, but it was a very nice atmosphere there and awesome hospitality. Thanks, we are looking forward to more. You can read some more in depth on the discuss&discover blog and on the PHPUG Munich page.
Also I spent some time at the UXCamp in Berlin, this was another kind of BarCamp, topic-wise. Very interesting discussions about what front-end engineers and user interface designer see as their job description and area of work. It was really good to just get another view into the web world and step actually quite a bit away from programming, I can only recommend attending it.