mobile application development

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 … Read More

ETE 2012 – Doug Bellenger – Case Study: Creating a Cross Platform Experience

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From the abstract: During this talk, Doug will walk through Movitas’ successes and failures in creating a cross platform application that integrates destination information, communication functionality (messaging and calling), and social interaction for hotel and destination travelers. He’ll walk through the some of the development they’ve done to serve content to mobile web, hybrid applications, … Read More

ETE 2012 – Chiu-Ki Chan – Caching Strategies for Mobile Apps

From the abstract: Unlimited bandwidth? Always connected? Yeah right! Truth is, wireless coverage is spotty, and sometimes the internet is simply not available. In this talk, I am going to discuss a few design patterns that make your app snappy when connected, fully-functional when not. Caching strategies: persistent vs temporary Progressive loading: use placeholders while … Read More

Read and Write NFC Tags with PhoneGap

The phonegap-nfc plugin allows you to read and write NFC tags from a PhoneGap application using JavaScript. The plugin originally supported Android. The latest release adds support for Blackberry 7.0. After installing the plugin into your PhoneGap app (See README) it is easy to start scanning tags. Create a function that will handle the NFC … Read More

Camera Access from Android Browser

The browser in Android 4 is able to take pictures from a web page and display them without any plugins or server interaction. This demo uses the Device API and File API to take and display a picture on a phone using the browser. Try it on your Android phone http://don.github.com/html-cam/. I wrote this demo … Read More

Securing Data in iOS

There are numerous ways to secure data that you are storing on an iOS device. The Simple/Built-in Way The simplest way is to take advantage of the iOS Data Protection (iOS 4+). This can be accomplished by setting an attribute on a file like this: [[NSFileManager defaultManager] createFileAtPath:[self filePath] contents:[@”super secret file contents” dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] attributes:[NSDictionary … Read More

Philly ETE Mobile Apps

If you’re attending Philly ETE this week, be sure to check out our mobile apps. Android iPad iPhone Windows Phone Mobile Web

Sencha Touch 2 – Navigation View, Templates and Forms

This post will build on the example application from the Introduction to Sencha Touch post. We will look at sorting, templates, navigation and forms. Sorting In the existing code new items appear at the bottom of the list. I’d prefer to see the newest items first. After a Sorter is added to the Store, Sencha … Read More

Introduction to Sencha Touch

Steve Smith recently looked at jQuery Mobile and Backbone using a simple application that allowed a user to track their daily exercise. I’m going to duplicate his example using Sencha Touch. Sencha Touch is a framework for building mobile applications using HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript.  This example uses the Developer Preview of Sencha Touch 2.0. … Read More

ETE 2011 – David Kaneda – Building Rich User Experiences with Sencha Touch

From David Kaneda’s abstract: “Sencha Touch is a mobile web app framework that allows developers to create rich mobile apps which look and feel native. In addition to a robust set of UI components, Sencha Touch offers an object-oriented MVC architecture, data stores/models, and a flexible theming system. David Kaneda will cover the benefits of … Read More