Mobile

Technical application development training courses and articles tagged with Mobile (typically Smartphones & Tablet PCs)

Plus points for Intel’s Clover Trail mobile Atom SoC

Silicon chip giant Intel have announced the specs on their latest crop of portable powerhouses.

Codenamed Clover Trail+, the latest generation of their Atom-branded System on a Chip (SoC), brings the fight to manufacturers like Qualcomm and Nvidia who largely focus on ARM-based chip architecture. But Intel’s chips have the benefit of providing x86 support so full-blown Windows apps can be run – the previous generation of Clover Trail / Atom chips can be found in many Microsoft Surface devices.

These new Atom chips, dubbed Z2580, Z2560, and Z2520, will clock in at up to 2Ghz, and are fabbed at 32nm (that’s …

Silicon chip giant Intel have announced the specs on their latest crop of portable powerhouses.

Codenamed Clover Trail+, the latest generation of their Atom-branded System on a Chip (SoC), brings the fight to manufacturers like Qualcomm and Nvidia who largely focus on ARM-based chip architecture. But Intel’s chips have the benefit of providing x86 support so full-blown Windows apps can be run – the previous generation of Clover Trail / Atom chips can be found in many Microsoft Surface devices.

These new Atom chips, dubbed Z2580, Z2560, and Z2520, will clock in at up to 2Ghz, and are fabbed at 32nm (that’s really very small, which is good for power consumption and heat production). 

Intel Clover Trail + SoC Z2580

 

Because it’s a SoC, it fulfils more than just the role of the CPU – it delivers the grunt in the graphics department too, both 3D hardware rendering and HD video playback, and also handles radio functions with support for the latest 4G / LTE networks, so you can expect to see this underpinning the next tranche of Windows 8 devices – phones, tablets and dare I say, netbooks (are you even allowed to say netbook these days?)

 

 

 

ASP.NET MVC course updated to Version 4

Microsoft’s MVC4 framework brings in new options for detecting and serving ASP.NET MVC pages to Mobile devices. Our MVC 4 Framework training course gives .NET developers solid hands-on experience from the ground up, to create commercial-quality web apps.

Microsoft’s MVC4 framework brings in new options for detecting and serving ASP.NET MVC pages to Mobile devices.

There is now also fantastic support for WebAPI which is another Microsoft framework, taking the grunt work out of creating RESTful web services and they can run within your MVC 4 web apps, in their own projects, or hosted outside of IIS.

With WebAPI you can also automatically serialise data into pretty much any format required, handle Model Binding, and deal with Validation to name but a few of the useful new features.

Our MVC 4 Framework training course gives .NET developers solid hands-on experience from the ground up, to create commercial-quality web apps.

Touchy-feely tablet at CES 2013

BBC’s Dave Lee interviews a representative from Tactus who demonstrates “what they believe to be the World’s first tactile touchscreen”. It looks pretty awesome:

Tactus Tactile Tablet technology - BBC clip from CES 2013

Looking forward to seeing how this technology progresses…

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BBC’s Dave Lee interviews a representative from Tactus who demonstrates “what they believe to be the World’s first tactile touchscreen”. It looks pretty awesome:

Tactus Tactile Tablet technology - BBC clip from CES 2013

Looking forward to seeing how this technology progresses…


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Titanium Backup just got Titaniumer…Update.zip FTW!

My joint-first favourite Android App Titanium Backup (the other being Tasker) was updated with a hugely powerful new feature – you can now create an update.zip containing apps+data, apps only or data only.

My joint-first favourite Android App Titanium Backup (the other being Tasker) was updated with a hugely powerful new feature – you can now create an update.zip containing apps+data, apps only or data only.

Titanium Backup Android App Logo

If you’re not an obsessive Rom flasher (like me), what this means is you can try out a brand-new version or flavour of the Android operating system on your phone, and before you’ve even loaded up the new ROM for the first time, pretty much all your data can be restored with an absolute minimum of fuss.

Other PRO-version features include:

  • User & System apps supported
  • Files >150 MB can be uploaded to Dropbox.
  • Improved “Overview of app storage use” screen, shows app location & supports refresh / click / long-click.
  • Improved fault tolerance for Dropbox upload.
  • Fixed failure to un-protect backups on ext2/3/4.
  • Winning all the things.

Great update…get it now!



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Line of Business (LOB) Mobile Apps

Businesses and organisations are ramping up development of internal and external customer-facing mobile and tablet apps which are highly specific to their industry, rather than relying on off-the-shelf packages and old-school web-apps. We can help with mobile app design, development and deployment strategy.

If you hadn’t already noticed, smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in daily life – you’re just as likely to see someone pull out an iPad on the tube ride into work as a copy of The Times. And you can bet the chap with the tablet is less likely to annoy his fellow commuters than the one struggling with a large, noisy broadsheet.

So with all this portable gadgetry taking on such a starring role in people’s private lives, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that we are pretty comfortable with the idea of integrating smart devices in the workplace.

Businesses and organisations are ramping up development of internal and external customer-facing mobile and tablet apps which are highly specific to their industry, rather than relying on off-the-shelf packages and old-school web-apps.

We’ve helped many software development and project management teams in a wide variety of sectors pick up the skills needed to understand and capture user requirements, create and test code, and develop and maintain a strategy for deploying Line of Business mobile apps for platforms such as Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Through our custom mobile software development training sessions and consultancy activities, we’ve been involved with projects focussing on the development and deployment of Line of Business apps in areas such as:

  • Sales & customer survey app for large event organiser (iPad)
  • Knowledge Base front-end for major software house (iOS / iPhone / iPad)
  • User Interface for roving customer reps for large CRM developer (Android)
  • Business Intelligence dashboard for public sector organisation (iOS)
  • GUI design and workflow for major Antivirus developer (Android)

Not everyone needs a mobile app for their business – there’s no point investing time and energy just for the sake of it. But if you are considering how your workforce and/or customers might benefit from native mobile apps with which to interact with you and your products or services, then we can help get the ball rolling, and keep it moving in the right direction.

Here are some courses you might want to check out –

…our team of experienced mobile experts are also happy to help with consultancy services in all aspects of mobile app development and deployment, so please do get in touch if your project needs a kick-start or on-going guidance.



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Android Jelly Beans on the Galaxy Nexus

Fear not, robotic confections aren’t storming the galactic hub. But Galaxy Nexus owners have had the chance to play with the latest increment of Google’s Smartphone OS, Jelly Bean for a week or so.

Fear not, robotic confections aren’t storming the galactic hub. But Galaxy Nexus owners have had the chance to play with the latest increment of Google’s Smartphone OS, Jelly Bean for a week or so.

android 4.1 jelly bean

The system dump is already on XDA if you fancy getting your hacking hat on – it’ll be interesting to see which phone gets a workable port first.

Some of the new features and improvements you’ll find in Android 4.1 include smoother scrolling, Google Now (more in a mo), and something that will keep musicians and app developers happy – much lower latency audio. The “GNex” can play audio almost ten times faster than it could on Ice Cream Sandwich – reportedly 12ms down from a very noticeable 100ms. Hopefully as a result we’ll start to see some really decent musical apps (I’m thinking soft synths, samplers, e-drums) to rival those found on iOS.

Google Now is interesting. It’s like iOS’s Siri has been strapped down and pumped full of chemicals, like the pre-cogs from Minority Report. It knows things before you do, and tells you about them.

But rather than warn you about pre-meditated murder, it’ll wake you with the weather you’ll encounter during the day, what the traffic’s like (and update your commute route automatically), and all sorts of realtime stuff like sports results, train times, and geo-location-related things like local restaurant reviews and how to get there.


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Windows 8 Surface Tablet Surfaces

Two new tablets released by Microsoft – one running on ARM, the other on Intel Ivy Bridge.

Windows 8 on Microsoft Surface – is beauty skin-deep?

By choosing to step back into hardware we can assume Microsoft are hoping these products will follow in the footsteps of the hugely-successful Xbox consoles…

Their latest foray into the hardware market was announced this week trumpeting the arrival of two tablet lines running Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Pro respectively. The level of technical detail is hardly of a forensic level, but there’s enough there to tweak our interest.

Both of these tablet product lines are constructed around an all-magnesium case, have 10.6 Gorilla glass displays and a magnetically attached cover that doubles as a full multi-touch keyboard and trackpad.

The Windows 8 RT tablet has an ARM-based architecture, connectivity comes via Wireless Networking, micro HDMI, microSD and USB 2.0 and a choice of 32 or 64GB of solid-state storage. This kit is packed into a case 9.3mm thick and weighs in at 600g – almost identical to the third gen iPad (9.4mm and 652g).

The Windows 8 tablet is Intel-based with an Ivy Bridge Core I5 with either 64 or 128 GB of storage, USB 3.0, Mini Display Port, pen input support and a higher resolution display (1080p). It’s a little more chunky that its stable mate – 13.5mm thick and 900g

The release dates are tied to the Windows 8 launch, so we expect sometime around mid-autumn 2012 for the RT and the end of the year for the Pro.

If you are considering developing for these devices we provide scheduled and on-site courses in Windows 8 Development and Windows 8 Metro style App Development




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Windows 8 Store App Development with HTML5 and JavaScript

Our WIndows 8 Store App Development course is aimed at web and desktop application developers who need to understand the new ways in which Windows Store apps (previously known as Metro-style apps) are developed for Windows 8 mobile and desktop platforms.

You’ll gain excellent hands-on experience with Visual Studio 2012 and program code / develop apps using HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS3 and gain an understanding of the C++ elements that underly native apps on Windows 8.

Mobile App Development Strategy Overview

Our Mobile App Development Strategy Overview is for anybody who is considering commissioning or building in-house an app for their business, and needs a solid understanding of what’s involved.

The course will provide an unbiased overview of the pros and cons of different methods of building apps, the platforms and languages available, central concepts (while busting any jargon), the key stages of development, and the criteria for what makes an app a success.

The course includes case studies of different types mobile apps – for tablet or smartphone – which have been successful.