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iPhone 5 Quick Tip: How to add letterboxing back to your iOS 6 app

So you’ve removed letterboxing from your iPhone 5 app by adding a Default-568h@2x.png launch image. And there was much rejoicing. Except now all of your layouts are messed up, and you’re supposed to push an app update through to the store tomorrow. So you delete the Default-568h@2x.png launch image and…nothing. Your app still seems to be running in full-screen mode. What’s the deal? It seems to be a bug, but there is a workaround. Here are the steps that I went…

So You Want To Build An Android App?

If you’re reading this, you likely have an iPhone/iPad (iOS) application and are interested in expanding to the Android platform. You’ve probably already asked the hard questions to define what you want, why you want it, and how it fits into your roadmap. This article will help your business understand the impact of the Android effort. Android != iOS This should be obvious, but too often business think “I have an iOS app, how different can it be?” The challenges…

Going mobile? The key to any successful project is asking tough questions before you write code

The following is an article written by Don Coleman, Director of Mobile Development, which was originally published in the July issue of NJ Tech News. About half of U.S. businesses will be in the mobile market by the end of 2012, according to a recent survey by Robert Half Technology (“Mad for Mobile.” New Jersey TechNews, April 2012). Nearly a quarter of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to develop a mobile application for the first time this year. The…

Android Unit Testing With Robolectric

Are you interested in adding Robolectric to your development process? Here’s a quick introduction to the most common types of test cases and some best practices to consider when deciding your testing strategy. I’ve created two example apps for your reference. The first is a glorified Hello World and the other is a simple animation app. If you are unfamiliar with Robolectric, I’d start with my introductory blog that details how to integrate IntelliJ, Robolectric, and Maven into your project….

Integrating Robolectric with IntelliJ

Unit testing is a best practice, but has been particularly difficult in Android. One library that makes this process much simpler is Robolectric. Integration into your project can be tricky and most methods start with maven and create an Android project from scratch. I’m a huge fan of living in IDE-land as much as possible, so this approach minimizes command line work and manual project configuration. This tutorial will walk you through using IntelliJ to generate the project and maven…

Using Cocoapods to Manage Private Libraries

Introduction Cocoapods (http://cocoapods.org/) is a dependency management framework for XCode. It allows you to declaratively define project dependencies and have them included in the build of your project. It’s like Apache Maven or Ruby Gems for XCode. There are many tutorials on getting started with Cocoapods, so in this blog post I will present a simple case where we have a project that depends upon two internally developed projects or private libraries. We will start by creating two projects, each…

Using Maven to Integrate Flyway in an Existing Database – Part 2

This is the second article of a two-part series on using Maven to integrate Flyway in an existing database. It addresses several key issues including using Maven profiles to manage promotion of migrations to hierarchical levels of a database as well as managing migrations across multiple disparate projects that use the same database. Unless you are an experienced Maven and Flyway user, it is suggested you review the first article of this series, Using Maven to Integrate Flyway in an…

Using Maven to Integrate Flyway in an Existing Database – Part 1

I was recently asked by a client to investigate database versioning / migration tools. Having had previous experience with Rails db Rake tasks and Liquibase, both of which require a DSL, I looked for a more Java-friendly tool and found Flyway. One of the pre-requisites was to be able to integrate the tool with an existing database and SQL scripts to reduce the learning curve for application development personnel. We were also looking for a tool we could run with…

Chariot Day: Then and Now

New and Cool AJAX, DWR and Spring Intro to JPA Spring and Groovy Intro to Ruby Selenium Web Testing Firebug: Web Debugging Evolved Spring Webflow Django as a Second Language Intro to Maven Google AppEngine: A Simple App Introduction to Asynchronous Servlets Introduction to Spring Batch Apache Camel Intro to Lift Grails Is, Knows, and Can Intro to jQuery/jQuery Beyond Basics Intro to OSGi Spring Roo Akka 2012: Real-Time Web Applications 2012: Griffon: Groovy Desktop Apps 2012: Scala: Definitely Not…

Scalathon update – attend discounted training from Chariot Solutions, Typesafe, around the event!

Preparation for Scalathon 2012 is well underway. In addition to the coding and social attractions of last year’s successful event, this year’s Scalathon provides opportunities for Scala training. Typesafe and Chariot Solutions are offering three Scala training classes, in conjunction with Scalathon. Even better, Scalathon attendees are eligible for substantial discounts on the training fees. The week prior to Scalathon, we are offering the Fast Track to Scala course, probably the best way to dive head-first into Scala. This will…

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