Posts Tagged ‘iOS’
The Web as we know it have been born and matured on computers, but as it turns out now, computers no longer have dominance in it. According to a recent report by analyst Mary Meeker, mobile devices running iOS and Android now account for 45 percent of browsing, compared to just 35 percent for Windows machines. Moreover, Android and iOS have essentially achieved their share in just five years and their share is getting tremendously larger.
According to some forecasts their worldwide number of mobile devices users should overtake the worldwide number of PC users next year. If forecasts come true, this shift will not only continue, but accelerate. Based on data from Morgan Stanley, Meeker estimates roughly 2.9 billion people around the world will be using smartphones and tablets by 2015.
What does it mean now that more people are accessing the Web through tablets and smartphones rather than laptops and desktops? And is it really a big deal? Anyway, Internet is intended to be accessed from anywhere and thus from any device. Well, it is quite a change at least in terms most people consider the Web and how it gradually adapts to be used on mobile devices.
Apps-like sites
As mobile devices take over, the use of today’s desktop browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will decline. Mobile browsers are already very capable and will increasingly adopt HTML5 and leading-edge Web technologies. As mobile devices naturally have less screen area, the sites need to function more like mobile apps and less like collections of links. So the sites are likely to look like apps.
Apps may rule
Native apps for smartphones and tablets almost always surpass websites designed for mobile devices because they can tap into devices’ native capabilities for a more responsive and seamless experience. This is most likely to change in the nearest future – most experts agree HTML5 is eventually the way of the future. This is already the status quo in social gaming: for example Angry Birds and Words with Friends. Some services won’t be available at all to traditional PCs — they won’t be worth developers’ time.
Less information at once
Web sites and publishers will no longer be able to display everything new for users and hoping something will catch the user’s eye. Smaller screens and lower information density means sites will need to adjust to user preferences and profiles to customize the information they present. Increasingly, the Internet will become unusable unless sites believe they know who you are. Some services will handle these tasks themselves, but the most likely contenders for supplying digital identity credentials are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and mobile carriers.
Sharing by default
In a mobile-focused Internet, anonymity becomes rare. Virtually every mobile device can be definitively associated with a single person (or small group of people). Defaults to share information and experiences with social circles and followers will be increasingly common, along with increasing reliance on disclosure of personal information (like location, status, and activities, and social connections) to drive key functionality. As the Internet re-orients around mobile, opting out of sharing will increasingly mean opting out of the Internet.
Emphasis on destination
Internet-based sites and services will increasingly function as a combination of content and functionality reluctant to link out to other sites or drive traffic (and potential advertising revenue) elsewhere. These have long been factors in many sites’ designs but mobile devices amplify these considerations by making traditional Web navigation awkward and difficult. Still URLs are not going to die – people will still send links to their friends and Web search will remain most users primary means of finding information online.
Going light weight
As people rely on mobile, cloud, and broadband services, the necessity to do things like commute, store large volumes of records or media, or patronize physical businesses will decline. Businesses won’t need to save years of invoices, statements, and paperwork in file boxes and storage facilities – cloud storage comes as their rescue. Banks will become purely virtual institutions consumers deal with online via their phones. Distance learning and collaborative tools will let students take their coursework with them anywhere — and eliminate the need to worry about reselling enormous textbooks.
Going mobile is an obvious trend today. Experts envisage that nearly every service, business, and person who wants to use the Internet will be thinking mobile first and PC second, if they think about PCs at all. Do you agree? And what other related changes can you imagine?
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts 
Kind regards,
Aliona Kavalevich – Business Development Manager (LI page)
Aliona.Kavalevich@altabel.com
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
With the growing popularity of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices the living has become more comfortable. The different types of apps help us to wake up in time, to entertain reading books, booking tickets, listening to favorite music and just chat with friends without extra expenses. Among the challenges in mobile app market stands also the developing of effective web browsing solutions.
In this article I would like to take a look at DHTMLX Touch framework that helps to create nice-looking and easy-to-use mobile web apps oriented to touchscreen devices.
DHTMLX Touch is a free open source Javascript framework/library for building HTML5-based mobile web apps.
DHTMLX was originally designed to work in traditional mouse-driven web browsers, however since the web moved to mobile devices, it was important to have all parts of the web interface touch-ready and looking good on small screens. After some tests made were approved that DHTMLX library will definitely work in mobile environments with Javascript support too. So the planned mouse was replaced with touch events to provide touch-based user interactions.
Let’s see what the characteristics of DHTMLX Touch are:
-compatible with the main web browsers for mobile platforms that support HTML5;
-free under both GNU GPL and commercial Licenses;
-lots of technical samples with the source code that simplify studying how the UI elements work;
- expanded builder tools:
• Skin Builder – an online tool that allows you to build mobile web apps through a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. Since v.1.2, you can save your design or share it by sending an URL.
• Visual Designer - a simple online tool that provides an easy way to choose the skin for you app and customize the skin colors. A set of predefined skins is included.
• Touch UI Inspector – a free extension for Google Chrome that provides a handy visual tool for monitoring the inner state of DHTMLX Touch JavaScript components on a web page.
-server side is based on the on dhtmlxConnectors (the same that used for DHTMLX Ajax library) that simplifies client –server communication;
- simplified scheme of CSS editing.
The current version of DHTMLX Touch framework took a long way from the release of its first components dhtmlxTree and dhtmlxGrid in 2005-2006 to become a complete tool that covers the most required aspects of modern application interface. Three months ago in September, 2012 was presented the updated version 1.2. And now we will see what are the new features and improvements were added:
* Bug fixing – more stable and faster performance, better compatibility with the latest iOS and Android platforms;
* Updated visual designer tool: new Unitlist component, new charts, and the ability to share and save your design;
* Auto-complete for IDEs: Microsoft Visual Studio, PHPStorm, WebStorm, NetBeans, Aptana Studio, Eclipse, and others
* Multiple fixes in form validation logic
* Better memory management: automatic destructors clean up the memory, which helps to prevent memory leaks if the app has a complicated inheritance structure
* Better support of full-screen mode
Many companies around the world make the preference towards DHTMLX saying that it’s very simple, flexible and easy-to-use with a live support forum.
If you have already an experience working with DHTMLX Touch framework or heard something about using it, feel free to share your thoughts/experience by leaving a comment.
You can also have a look at new features of DHTMLX Touch framework and the samples of apps already implemented following the link to the official website
http://dhtmlx.com
.
Thank you for your attention,
Kind regards,
Katerina Bulavskaya
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
This time as a part of cross platform development I’d like to make a short review of Mono project’s implementations/frameworks – MonoTouch and Monodroidthat allow creating applications using .NET framework and languages.
MonoTouch is a framework that allows developers create iPhone applications using the compilation of C# and reusing the existing .NET source code, libraries and skills.
The MonoTouch includes:
• Mono for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
• C# and .NET compilers – on the iPhone you will need to compile the existing C# code and tools with the help of MonoTouch compiler to make sure that all the assemblies are referenced.
• .NET Bindings to Native APIs – MonoTouch compiler turns to compile the .NET libraries and base assemblies to create native iPhone applications.
• Mac oriPhoneSDK -includes the Xcode IDE, iPhone Simulator, and a suite of additional tools for developing applications for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
• MonoDevelop Integrationhelps developers to integrate all features/toolsets from the integrating.NET platform to the target iPhoneenvironment from zero in no time
• Libraries that bind the native CocoaTouch APIs – toolsets that help to create native application interfaces for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
Mono for Android (MonoDroid)is a software development environment kit that allows to create the applications that run on Android phones and tablets.
Mono for Android consists of the core Mono runtime, the Mono for Android bindings to the native Android APIs, a Visual Studio 2010 plug-in to develop Android applications and an SDK that contains the tools to build, debug and deploy your applications. The Visual Studio 2010 plug-in allows developers to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop, debug and deploy their applications to an Android simulator, an Android device, or the Android Application Store.
What’s new?
Being the customer of Mono product you get one-year subscription to its product updates. The updates engaged the bug fixes and API changes. You could check the latest updates for Mono on the website called Xamarian Developer Center following this linkhttp://docs.xamarin.com/.
One of the latest upgrades released in May of 2012 by Xamarian Mono for Android is considered the research project called XobotOS.
XobotOS – the attempt to put C# code in the place of removed Java code in Android operating system. The idea is to write native code using C# instead of Java seems to extend the opportunities of Mono project. As the developers say the transition from Dalvik to Mono virtual machine performed good results like high-performance and low-battery consuming. Sharpen was chosen as the tool convertor for porting million lines of Java code to C#. It was upgraded for XobotOs and presented as its part release. The next goal of the company isto provide the direct access to the graphics library Skia for building applications.
What is the pricing?
Monotouch/MonoDroidare available in Professional Edition and Enterprise Editions: Monotouch/MonoDroid costs $399 for the entry level Professional edition and $999 and $2,499 for the Enterprise and Enterprise Priority version. A trial version is available which isn’t time limited but only allows deployment to an iPhone simulator.
Summary
The development of applications using cross platforms development approach seems to give the right idea for the developers how to manage with different environments and languages. Having reviewed the Mono project frameworks the advantages both of them may be summed up as follows:
- Applications written in C# for Android (MonoDroid) could be easily ported to iOS (MonoTouch);
-The source code written on C#, could be reused in MonoDroid and MonoTouch;
- The full support of C#: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), delegates, lambdas, events, garbage collection and many other features
- The support of Visual Studio and XCodefor bothMonoDroid and MonoTouch
- New challenges and updates guides
If you know something about programming with MonoTouch/ModoDroid and you have anything to add to my review, please, feel free to share your thoughts and experience on this point.
Best regards,
Katerina Bulavskaya
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
- In: iPhone | IT Applications | Tablets
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With the iPad’s domination of the tablet space and the iPhone continuing to enjoy strong sales, interest in development for these two platforms keeps growing. If you’re getting ready to jump into iOS development, these practical insights will help you get started.
First of all you need a Mac. It may sound like a conspiracy theory to get folks to buy Macs, but without a Mac you won’t be able to get your application onto a device for testing. And you need to be testing on a device.
You really should get an iPad and an iPhone or iPod Touch. Yes, there is a simulator. But the truth is simulators only go so far in replicating the experience a user will have. Even “simple” applications can be a joy to use in the simulator and a hassle on an actual device. And since you’ll likely want your application to work well both for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad, you will want to get an iPad and either an iPhone or an iPod Touch (the two are identical as far as development is concerned).
Objective-C is a bit of a throwback. While Objective-C supports modern programming elements like object-oriented code, it is a fairly low-level language, too, and it clearly has not strayed too far from C.
XCode is radically different from Eclipse and Visual Studio. Coming from the Visual Studio system, with a couple of minor detours into Eclipse, you’ll find XCode a bit jarring. The focus is really less on everything that happens in the toolbars, sidebars, and menus, and more on what happens in the middle of the screen, which is writing code as text. This isn’t to say that XCode isn’t visual or that it lacks tools. But the overall system simply has a different philosophy from the kitchen sink approach that Eclipse and Visual Studio take.
XCode is ready to work with Subversion or Git. Out of the box, XCode comes equipped to work with Subversion or Git. You are still free to use any other source control system you want (through command-line tools, if they don’t have a GUI system or XCode integration). But if you already use Subversion or Git, you will be happy.
You should sign up for your developer account early. It can take up to two weeks for your developer account to be approved. The sooner you sign up, the sooner you will be able to get your app deployed to your test devices or uploaded to the App Store for approval.
There are different types of developer accounts. Developer accounts come in three major flavors: individual, company/organization, and enterprise. The main difference between individual and company/organization is that the latter allows you to create users within the account who can access it. Individual accounts are limited to a single user. Enterprise accounts are an entirely different beast: They allow for private deployments, which is exactly what an IT department writing apps for internal use needs. There is also an academic account for students, which allows some access to the developer program.
You can write code without a developer account. The good news is, if you are just learning, and are willing to forego deployment to a test device or putting your app in the App Store, you can use XCode and the iOS simulator without a developer account. The developer account has lots of benefits, including early access to betas and such, but for learning purposes, no account is needed.
iPads are not just big iPhones. When designing UIs, it’s tempting to think that iPads are just large iPhones. While this is more or less true at a code level (apps that run on iPhone will run on the iPad, though iPad-specific apps will not run on iPhone), it is a big mistake for designing the UI. An iPad’s bigger screen allows you to pack a lot more information on the screen without overwhelming the user, and the larger screen size will affect what kinds of UI widgets can be comfortably used.
There are alternatives to Objective-C and XCode. If, for whatever reason, you do not want to work with Objective-C and XCode, that is just fine. A wide variety of other options are available for iPad and iPhone development work. You can run C in MonoTouch or use HTML and JavaScript in Titanium (or a number of other systems) — and those are just two of the more well-known options. Once you stop working in Objective-C, you do not need to be using XCode, either.
Best Regards,
Kristina Kozlova
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
