Well most of you would remember the “Genie and the Lamp." As a kid I was mesmerized by the power of Genie to change form and his ability to do things. My personal favourite was him coming out and going back to the lamp. Once genie moves back to his lamp there is no doubt where he is for the kids, it’s not in the bedroom or dining room it’s inside the "Magic Lamp."

Animations are the “Most Coolest” part when you use an application. Still remember the first time I was introduced to MAC OSX. That day I witnessed the magnificent welcome screen for OSX Leopard, "Welcome" coming out in different languages on screen, and it also gave me the feel of traveling through space. I fell for that OS, even before I started using it, but there were more to come. Creating a ripple on Dashboard while adding new widgets, the Genie effect on minimizing the app. the list goes on.

These are not only cool; they are a way of communicating to the user what just happened. 

Do you know where Genie is now? Yes, he is still inside the lamp. Do you know why you still remember it? Obviously, it’s because the genie didn't vanish into the thin air, instead he slowly moved in to the lamp. Likewise, animation should also be obvious, should tell its story.

Prolonged animations may not be suitable at all times. If you select a button, and it starts vibrating or make ripples it may initially gather a wow for the animation, but later when the user starts really using that stuff might irritate him.
There may be animations/ideas which are yet to be utilized. It maybe from cartoons, it maybe from what we see in our day to day life… their source is unknown, but my search still continues for these lost artefacts.

( Jackson Sunny Rodrigues is an extremely talented iOS Programmer at Software Associates. Follow him on twitter at @jaxsonrodrigues, or catch up with him on Facebook at Jackson Rodrigues. )

According to the latest statistics from Google, around 2/3 of the search comes from iOS alone. Apple has already sold 200 million iOS devices. And latest reports confirm that Android devices are taking up the market share. This definitely shows the change in peoples preferences. PC's will definitely be there but mobile would be preferred/pampered. Mobile has traveled along way from just a medium of communication to medium of unlimited knowledge. Times are gone when user could sit in-front of his PC to check his mail or do other tasks. He now prefers it to be done on the go.

Have you ever wondered why Social Networking sites created  apps which only gives restricted features to the user than its web version? Please try your favorite on your mobile, you will know it. With touch screen devices its hard to click on a link without any errors. Most of the time I tried I couldn't do it properly. I move to the wrong content. As far as a user is concerned these are really annoying stuff and its also wasting his time.

Mobile apps are designed confirming to device standards, A daily user wouldn’t have any confusion using it,  Apps would actually do a lot of stuff for him too.

When I open my Tab I gets instantly updated. I get alerts, notifications, mails etc.. Earlier I had to spend around half an hour now I lose only 5 mins.

From a service providers perspective too there are lot of advantages. You have an new offer for your customer and you need to notify him. Earlier you would send a email, even if user sees it there is no guarantee that he would check it, he might be busy. With specialized apps and notification this is just as easy as checking your SMS. Well that would definitely make your customer check it. The response you receive is almost instant, getting a head start is always better when you have competition. 

( Jackson Sunny Rodrigues is an extremely talented iOS Programmer at Software Associates. Follow him on twitter at @jaxsonrodrigues, or catch up with him on Facebook at Jackson Rodrigues. )

Before storyboard came into the picture, we had to use independent XIB files in-order to form the UI design but with this storyboard we can make our UI very easily as it is possible to incorporate all the XIB files into one XIB file, which is basically our new storyboard (represented as MainStoryboard.storyboard' in the xcode) .It basically holds the collection of XIB files, which allows you to visually control all the views in it and how those views will segue between each other. Thus, the entire flow of your app's interface can be modeled and visualized through your single storyboard file.

You can easily implement new ideas in your design all in one glance. There by you will be able to identify and refine the good ideas.

Furthermore, it is easier for you to make changes in the design, as the story board allows you to make all the connections /relationships with the view controllers/views there itself. Many new features are available now in the story board that helps you in doing that.

Storyboarding can also enable you to create table view cells and table view controllers with simplicity. Using storyboard instead of XIB flies will let you cut a lot of code out of your project. A project built with Storyboarding will be compatible with IOS 5 and greater.

(Anu K , is a passionate iOS Developer at Software Associates. Catch up with her on Facebook at Anu Karayil) 

If we look into user interface design, we can see that for the past few years, it has been changing constantly. Until now the keyboard and mouse stayed as the unavoidable input devices. But by the launch of tablets,  slates, smartphones and hand held machines, it seems they got flushed away. The methodology of pointing the cursor and selecting is out of the industry. Why do we need a cursor or a mouse, if we can select what we want from our device by a mere touch?

Yes, it’s the touch era. The era of touch screens, panels, iPads, pods whatever you call it. The touch interface was a newbie to the industry few years back and now rules the interface technology in almost all devices. It’s being standardized by most of the devices and all other interface methodologies of the past are vanishing in front of its high level usability.

Having somewhat good experience in application development over excellent touch devices in the industry, we would like to share some of the user interface methodologies that we follow to get the maximum out of applications.

User interface design concepts

• Keep enough white space in between icons and links. Go for large icons so that they can be consistently tapped with full accuracy.
• Identify the core functionality for which your application is built and keep its reach in minimum number of taps.
• Guide your user to the maximum. It provides high level of comfort over the usability factor of your application. The latest trend is to make the device communicate with the user at each and every point of navigation.
• Touch screen by nature gives better usability for information retrieval rather than data entry. Even though we have a limit in implementing data retrieval throughout, try to design forms and other content with options to tap and select rather than typing.
• Make your application run in full screen resolution of the respective device with items centralized in alignment.
• Design your application in an intuitive manner, unless it’s an invention. The property “intuitive” demands the new application to follow same basic standards that similar applications available in the industry are following. The core reason is that the user may be familiar with these standards and by launching an intuitive application to the industry, we can provide the user with the convenience of starting to use it without reading the manual to an extent, with his gained experience over similar products. A client’s interest in a current application might have motivated his request to build a similar one for his own business. Hence keep an eye on the intuitive property.
• The property that makes the application to be used by both right and left handed users with the same level of usability is called ambidextrous in touch interface design.  A simple instance of this property can be made clear from the figures below.

          (Figure 1)                                                    (Figure2)

Let this be the home screen of an application and 1, 2 and 3 are the buttons for navigation. In figure 1 alignment of button will suit the right handed users as they can hold device easily with left and tap over the buttons with complete balance. But this can cause a level of hardness in left handed users as they hold one end and has to press at other end of the device. They may need to hold the device in their forearm and type to keep balance. In the case of figure 2, vice versa will be the result. Things get worse if we align the buttons to any particular side, as in figure (3)

             ( Figure 3 )                                            (Figure 4)

• Most of the touch interface devices are equipped with accelerometer, the technology that supports flipping of application view according to the way we hold the device. It provides high level of usability for users. Let your application exploit the maximum out of this property of the device by passing necessary values and thereby guaranteeing maximum usability.

Along with these concepts, keep your application apt in high performance as it matters the most when considering user preferences.

Reference:

• http://www.foilball.com/best-practices-of-good-touch-screen-interface-design
  
• www.touchuserinterface.com/
  
• http://multitouch.at/
  

Our Android smartphone and iPad CI teams recently came across an application ‘Hudson’ which made life a lot easier for them. Hudson manages the CI process by integrating changes to the project thereby providing the development team with a fresh build every time. The developer can configure Hudson to receive regular emails that capture the output on each build, alerting when something goes wrong.

Installing Hudson is easy enough; just execute hudson.war file or deploy it in a servlet container. Since the output is sent through email to the concerned accounts, it does not require a database. Accessing Hudson is as easy as accessing a website. Just type in http://localhost:8080/ (on local machine) or http://domain:portnumber/ (on remote machine), in a web browser and the user will be presented with the web GUI for Hudson. The GUI is simple and offers all the configuration details required for Hudson. Hence, the user is not exposed to intricate coding details.

To configure a new job for Hudson, a user has to authenticate himself to create a job, execute it etc. Select “New Job”, type in a unique Job Name and select "Build a free_style software project". On clicking on OK you will be moved to a page where you can specifically configure Hudson for a new job. One can also get to the configuration page by clicking on the job names listed in Hudson and by selecting Configure.

In the project configuration page, the following steps need to be followed,

1. Enter the Project name.

2. Source Code Management: Select radio button Subversion

          2.1 Select the path to Repository URL for SCM

                     Eg: https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/svn/platform/FolderName

          2.2 Select check-box "Use update".

                    If checked, Hudson will use 'svn update' whenever possible, making the build faster. But this causes the artifacts from  the previous build to remain when a new build starts.

3. Build Triggers:   Select check box Poll SCM

          3.1 Set schedule 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50… This sets HUDSON to poll SCM every 0th, 10th    20th, 30th …50th minute

4. Build :  Select drop-down "Add build step"

• select "Execute shell"
• fill "Command" section

          For the techie reader, check out the build configuration command examples,

          For iPhone,

                rm -rf $WORKSPACE/hudsonbld/*rmdir $WORKSPACE/hudsonbldmkdir $WORKSPACE/hudsonbldcd $WORKSPACE/Job Name/checker-240/scan-build -v -o $WORKSPACE/ScanBldOutput xcodebuild -project AppName.xcodeproj -target TargetAppName -configuration Debug -sdk iphonesimulator 3.1.3 TARGET_BUILD_DIR=$WORKSPACE/hudsonbld

          For Android,

                 cd $WORKSPACE/trunk  ant debug

5. Post-build Actions

• Select checkBox “E-mail Notification”. Fill in the recipients email addresses separated by comma.
• Select check-box "Send e-mail for every unstable build" which mails a report on every unstable build to the specified recipients.
• Select check-box "Send separate e-mails to individuals who broke the build"

6. Click Save and you are good to go.

Hudson can be used in any development platform, by changing the build configuration command accordingly. Investing in the CI infrastructure has turned out to be a good call for us, by allowing our development teams’ incremental code integration and well-timed code checks which makes the final integration manageable and also provides a robust copy of software at each stage of the development process.

To know more about Hudson,

• http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Home
  

Android explains it as "A View that displays web pages. This class is the basis upon which you can roll your own web browser or simply display some online content within your Activity.…..". 

Well is it limited to displaying web pages ? 

Developing network based applications has always been challenging for developers. Well what makes it so challenging? For a desktop application we can assume that the resources will be available on demand. But when dealing with a network based application there is no guarantee as to whether we will receive the requested resource or even if it exists. Therefore the application must capable of recovering from such exceptions.

The two key factors affecting performance are latency and bandwidth. In desktop applications it doesn't matter much if you are accessing resources serially, but when it comes to network based applications, things change. Latency is more or less the same for every request. If you are accessing multiple resources serially, latency adds up and the delay increases. So as developers it is our job to reduce the effect of latency, which points us to parallel access of resources.

For this we could modify the system such that, the downloading of data is performed in the background, hidden from the end user. In such a situation, the user interactions are still possible, thereby masking the actual delay.

There are different ways of implementing this. But we need to adopt the method which presents us with less inconsistency, less code and less worry.

Consider a system, which requires loading images in sets of ten at a time. Here, the view will be filled with hundred or more images arranged in a grid, more like Mozilla’s Add On ‘Cooliris, but without that cool 3D effect. Now, you integrate an audio player which performs online streaming. The obvious solution for this will be using a separate class. 

Let’s see how these can be implemented with lesser amount of coding without reducing the performance or consistency.

Taking the case of image loading, create a UIWebView, in the place of an UIImageView. Append HTML script to a string, which would load the image, load the webview and handles everything else for us. Here HTML script would be script tags with an img tag having source specified to that images url.

Once these initializations are done a webview would be displayed and its content is fetched on access. To have more control over the webview, implement the functions declared in its delegate protocol UIWebViewDelegate. This allows us to handle events such as loading webview, loading finished, link clicked etc.

The size of the webview can be changed easily in accordance with the image size by just finding the image size using javascript and adjusting the webview accordingly.

Coming to the audio player, there is no need for creating a class which handles streaming, playing, pausing etc. Webview can implement the same functionality in a much easier way. Initialize the webview with the URL of the file to be played and you’re done! A separate class can be substituted with just a few lines of code.

Some  tablet devices had an issue in supporting the Android Google API. By creating a local webpage which loaded a map using Google Maps Javascript API V3, this problem can be solved. It is also possible to create a javascript interface in an activity which helped in accessing resources from the local webpage during execution.

Definitely webview is for displaying webpages and its contents, but utilizing it in right places at the right time gives us much more than that.

iPhone development team

We can consider different protocols to enable connection between enterprise data and hand held devices such as Apple iPhone and Google Android to write software programs for android applications and iPhone applications. They are SOAP, JSON and XML-RPC.

SOAP has a security extension which can be used to define features such as encryption, data integrity  However being an XML format, it only defines the standard. XML-RPC provides no such feature. JSON has security issues as the data passed is generally directly executed by the server, hence susceptible to data injection.

SOAP

Advantages

• Widely used.
• Suitable for complex structures.
• Standardized by W3C.

Disadvantages

• Consumes larger bandwidth for small data.

JSON

Advantages

• Handy for light weight data transfer
• Can take almost half of the bandwidth as XML for transferring the same data
• AJAX with JSON has got accepted well since JavaScript has the inbuilt capability to handle JSON data.
• It does not require parsing libraries in an application as XML does

Disadvantages

• It is not standardized
• Not recommended for complex structures

XML-RPC

Advantages

• Extremely easy to understand, implement, and debug
• Lighter than SOAP.

Disadvantages

• Not being maintained by a standards committee
• Lot more more complex than SOAP. eg., passing an object as an argument to a function.

Software Associates provides ERP connectivty solutions for Android smartphones and Android Tablet devices

Are mid sized companies ready to empower their employees for mobility ? Do we have plug and play technology in place to connect to existing business objects without adding needless computing power or incurring unplanned budgetary costs ? Do we build these systems from scratch ?

TabletStack is a ready to use middle tier and mobile client solution to connect your existing databases to hand held devices such as Android smartphones and Android tablet devices. These are backed by a software product engineering team which brings nearly 2 decades of expertise to your cost advantage.

Standard features, benefits and offerings

• Configure data connectivity in under 30 minutes
• No need to build additional web services
• Secure cloud hosting environment
  
• Scheduled push of information ticker
• Pull based information on demand service
• Stateless application, consumes little bandwidth
• Standard HTTP protocol for firewall friendly access
• Supports devices such as Dell Streak, HTC Wildfire, iPad, iPhone, Samsung Galaxy etc
  
• Connectivity with relational databases such as Oracle, mySQL, Sql-server
• XML-RPC protocol as the standard for information exchange
• Data encryption and support for SSL
• Saves frequent referenced data locally on sql-lite
• Trace IP addresses of client requests
• Trace location and time of requesting client
• MAC Id monitoring and access control
• White labeled applications for OEM vendors and web partners

Tablet PC application development

• Two way sync of data between tablet PC and enterprise information
• Query By Example (QBE) to define your information stack

Android Tablet, Smartphone and Apple iPad application areas

• ERP data access for field staff, remote location management
• Weekly push based reporting for top and middle management
• Stock alerts and drug interaction warnings for pharmacists
• IT infrastructure management alerts
• Data collection for scientific analysis
• Information on demand service for physicians
• Conduct organization surveys and opinion polls
• Club membership management and custom reporting
• Preventive maintenance for production units
• Information ticket for circulars and alerts
• Custom connect to open source suites such as Sugarcrm, oscommerce etc
• UK and USA google map integration
• Connect with Sage invoicing and other popular products

Internet changed lives and the information age. The mobile computing devices are here to change personal computing habits. The ubiquitous PC, since IBM invented is finally beckoning change. First generation buyers would now prefer an iPad or an Android tablet over the bulky desktop or the expensive laptop and the stripped down netbook. iPad sold over 6 million since launch and now targets 15 million before the first anniversary. Hardware vendors are ditching proprietary systems and adopting android operating system as their next platform and buying a desktop operating system is turning out to be a thing of the past. Sub $200 dollar hand held Android devices are already in the market. Cloud computing would make shrink wrapped word processing software products irrelevant.

The corporate heads like style and convenience. IT managers should be able to work from any location to configure their server farms and sql-databases. Middle managers would access information with ease using touch screen devices. Operational staff should have daily figures pushed onto their personal tablet devices. Physicians want end of day admitted patient information status on life style devices. They all need applications that provide data access between hand held computing devices such as Android tablet, Android smartphones, and Apple iPads connect to existing information systems (ERP, CRM, SCM,HIMS etc)

SMS enabled information engines available in the markets enable some of these operations, but  are restricted by length of text, limited pull functionality and lacks convenience.

Call or write to us for more information on how our expertise in Apple iPad, Android tablet and Android smartphone development could seamlessly enable enterprise data connectivity for your clients with Android handheld devices and apple ipads.

The much awaited HTML5, the major revision of HTML, is expected to take over the world wide web by the end of 2010. It is considered to be the major replacer for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0. The most notable feature of HTML5 is its big foot over the plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun Java FX. The reason is that, HTML 5 can do whatever these applications can, in a perfect manner with its powerful set of tags and related attributes. If it is about the origin of HTML5, it’s a different story.

The core developers of HTML, the W3C was found to focus much on XML and XHTML rather than looking forward to real world application needs. The HTML working group felt disturbed over this and they formed a new group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).It focused purely to evolving web and its future .This group is the core team behind HTML5 and maybe that is why HTML5 is not a W3C recommendation yet. The latest news from Adobe Dreamweaver is that the new version Dreamweaver CS5 will be supporting the HTML5 and CSS3 in its full flavours.

Now looking over to HTML5 and conventional HTML, the following are the basic changes as an overview.

1) Simple DOCTYPE

 HTML5 requires very simple DOCTYPE: <!DOCTYPE html>.

2) Easy attributes for language

In HTML5 we don’t need to remember xml:lang attributes in the <html> tag. <html lang=”en”> will now make it work.

3) Trailing slashes taken off

Void elements in HTML5 such as the br, img and input elements don’t require a trailing slash.

4) Elements disappeared

These are the following set of element not supported in HTML5:

<acronym>, <applet>, <basefont>, <big>, <center>, <dir>, <font>, <frame>, <frameset>, <noframes>, <s>, <strike>, <tt>, <u> and <xmp>

New tags on deck

HTML5 Introduces, a very distinct set of powerful new tags.

·         audio – denoting an audio stream
·         source – the video or audio source files
·         video – denoting a video stream
·         canvas – a place to draw dynamic graphics
·         command – denotes a command button that has information sent to the server or script
·         datagrid – references dynamic data in a tree form or tabular data form
·         datalist – references a list of data in a drop-down list
·         details – provides additional details of a page element, like pop-up help text
·         output – references the output of a script or calculation
·         progress – represents a progress bar in the completion of a process
·         dialog – a conversation or people talking
·         hgroup – a grouping of header tags that should stay together
·         meter – a scalar gauge of measurement
·         time – a date or time

Features

High level of user privilege is the most highlighted feature of HTML5.The very new set of tags plays a crucial role for this achievement. . Of all tags  <video> takes the videos through web to a new level. HTML 5 video ensures maximum reach by allowing you to encode your video in as many formats as you need, so that your customers don’t need an additional plugin for viewing the video. It also lets you control every aspect of your video, from who can view it, how long it is, what the content is, where it's hosted and how the server performs etc as far we know till now.

Considering the Browser side, Google chrome, upcoming IE9, Apple safari, firefox 4.0 etc   are all set up for providing a perfect support for HTML5 pages.

Drawbacks

Some of the drawbacks pointed against HTML5 are based on hosting HTML5 videos to sites like youtube. They are

·         Encoding of video in at least three different codecs is needed
·         Browsers that don't support HTML 5 will work only with the aid of some set of java scripts
·         Bandwidth requirements of hosting videos must be satisfied

Another problem developers have to face is the conversion of XHTML 1 to HTML5, unless we have a well formed and valid XHTML document

HTML Team @ Software Associates

As we started working on the iPhone, most of the time we got jinxed with reference to Nib files. Well, one never saw a file with extension .nib as the only available files were .xib. After some digging we found that Apple were referring to Xib files. So we got to wonder why they referred a Xib file as a Nib file as in ‘awakeFromNib’,  while it could plainly be referred to as Xib . Later we realised that Nib files come from the days of NeXTSTEP. Technically speaking whether it’s a Nib or Xib file both served the same purpose, but have different format of storing. Xib files are of XML format and Nib files are archives. But after Building an application if you open the *.app file you wont see any *.xib files, there are only *.nib files. But we haven’t created any *.nib files right? Then how did the Nib files come and where did the Xib files go? Actually while compiling the application, Xcode uses a tool named ibtool to convert Xib files into Nib files, so that we don’t have to worry about conversion from XIB to NIB. 

Enough about Nib files and Xib files, let’s talk about designing an interface using the interface builder tool.  It’s a great tool linked with Xcode.

It gives developers the choice to create xib files. Either you should create the Xib while creating the viewcontroller (used to manipulate views and subviews in Xib files) in Xcode or you could create Xib files separately and after adding to Xcode, specify the viewcontroller’s name to its File’s Owner. An application would be preferred to have a single window and multiple Views. Developers can use just the Interface Builder or Objective C to develop the GUI. Both have their own virtues and vices. Interface Builder gives an exact idea as to how components in the interface would look and feel. Developers can adjust the components to meet their needs and make sure it meets the requirements at the same instance. But to have a better dynamic behaviour and maintenance, Interface builder is a hard choice. However if it is done using pure coding it becomes hard to know whether it’s meeting the needs. It challenges the iPhone developer to have a great imagination because he can see what the interface looks like only after building and running it first time, although creating a dynamic interface is fairly simple. One need to use the right mix for best results and happy coding.

iPhone team @ Software Associates