mobile - Xander Dumaine

Choosing a mobile platform to target

As a mobile developer, I often get questions like "Nice site! When's the mobile app coming?" or "we really need an app for this specific need, which platform should we use? or even "I want to make an app, but I don't know what yet -

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iPad Mini with Retina Display Review

For a while at work I was using an iPad Mini (first generation) for development, and I was able to take it home for general use, too. I finally got my own iPad (mostly because another developer needed the mini for a long project and this left me without a

technology

The Best Shortcut You can Create on Your iPhone

The best shortcuts are easy to remember, easy to use, and very beneficial. The ratio of effort to benefit approaches zero. The best example? ctrl + c to copy. It's intuitive, one handed, and saves a 2-3 mouse movements and clicks. The best shortcut you can add on your iPhone is

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Putting the "Smart" Back in "Smart Phone"

According to Go-Gulf (see the info graphic below), there are 1.08 billion smart phones in the world. This means there's a smart phone for about every 7 people on Earth. People are starting to take these smart phones for granted. In the past, only business people had smart phones,

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Hesitating Before Buying Apps

Lots of people comment about how ridiculous it is that we hesitate before or even completely refuse to spend a few bucks on an app, especially when compared to spending the same amount daily for coffee, or hundreds of times more for the smartphone, tablet, or PC that the app

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Tablets: A Disambiguation (Part 2)

Arguably the most important factor for people buying a first tablet is price. A common theme among them is to go for a “budget” tablet. I put budget in quotes because I prefer the term cheap. Using cheap more accurately conveys both the price and the quality of the device,

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Tablets: A Disambiguation (Part 1)

In the first quarter of this year, 2013, Apple shipped 19.5 million iPads1. Samsung shipped 8.8 million, Asus 2.7 million, and Microsoft 0.9 million. With others, this means in just 3 months, almost 50 million tablets were shipped worldwide. Of this, Android comprised 56.5% of

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Asynchronous Data Calls in Windows Store Apps

Below is the way that I’ve written my (MVVM, C#, XAML) Windows store app to make asynchronous data calls. This is necessary so that the UI doesn’t lock up while some network action or request is being performed. Make a function that gets your data synchronously. This makes

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Authenticating an HTTP Request with Client Certificates in iOS

I'm writing an app that uses a client-certificate to authenticate while performing a SOAP request. Unfortunately, I'm writing this app in PhoneGap, and the iOS WebView does not support Client Certificates for AJAX requests. I found some various sources of code and examples for doing this, but it took quite

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Creating an Enterprise App Catalog

Motive One of the challenges faced with developing in-house (or “enterprise”) mobile applications is deployment. For public applications, deployment is handled almost exclusively through platform app stores, like the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store. Deploying apps to employees of a single company, without making use of those

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PhoneGap in iOS 6

Update 9/27: This post relates to PhoneGap 2.0. 2.1 appears to have fixed a number of iOS 6 compatibility issues, and I recommend upgrading. Today I upgraded my Xcode to 4.5, which now builds apps against the iOS 6 sdk. This included many breakages to my

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Hardware vs Software Smartphone Keyboards

My dad is a big proponent of hardware keyboards on smartphones. Partly because of this, he’s a big fan of BlackBerries BlackBerrys BlackBerry® smartphones. We’ve talked about it before, and I’ve shown him products like Spike, that bring tactile feedback to virtual keyboards. He recently retweeted an

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jQuery Mobile vs Kendo UI

For the past couple of months, I’ve been developing cross-platform apps using PhoneGap. In this, I’ve been using jQuery Mobile as the client framework, tied with knockout.js. Knockout makes dynamic client side web applications extremely simple much cleaner and easier with an MVVM style design in javascript.

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PhoneGap - Developing Cross-Platform Mobile Applications

Developing a mobile application can be a tough venture. Many times, you're learning a language (or languages) that you've never used before, like Objective-C (Cocoa), Java, or c#. For most, there are APIs and SDKs to become familiar with (or in the case of Android, a whole slew of them)

software

7 Weeks of Senior Design

What is it? This quarter is my Senior Design Capstone class. This means 11 weeks of intensive design of an application and education in project management aspects such as source control, issue tracking, requirements elicitation, analysis, and change control. Sound boring? Well some of it is. I recognize how valuable