Software Blog  RSS News Feed  What's This? Select a topic from the list below. Topics are ordered by date with the eight most recent at the top. Show All Articles July 19th 2010
iPhone App Development
We are moving on from AJAX applications to the development of iPhone apps (and apps for other smartphone platforms). There are many challenges in making this move, some of which are described here. July 18th 2009
Facebook Security Issues
Facebook has serious problems with its attitude to privacy, so much so that they appear to be in breach of Canadian privacy laws. Any action by the Canadian government will however be limited to just a small part of the wider problem. Facebook has to go much, much further. This article makes some suggestions on how I think they should clean up their act. July 5th 2009
Multi-Language Support
Translations of complete web pages have come a long way from the early days of Babelfish, although they still leave a lot to be desired. But what if you only need to translate individual phrases? Should you construct the phrase in English and then use Google Translate or do we need to do something more sophisticated? November 4th 2007
Working From Home
Working from home is becoming easier and easier as computers, the internet and mobile phones become more sophisticated. Why then don't more people (and more companies) embrace it? July 8th 2007
Using AJAX In Practice
AJAX is a powerful programming tool that is without doubt the future of the internet. However, until the search engine and browser developers catch up with the new reality, there are a few gotcha's you need to be aware of. April 22nd 2007
Web Design Trends
Web pages are moving away from fancy graphics to dynamic interactive sites with added value for users. To develop such pages, web developers need to be able to program in a variety of different languages. If you can't program, there soon won't be a place for you in the web development industry. March 19th 2007
More On Mobile Devices
Mobile devices become smaller and more multi-functional with fewer buttons and bigger, touch sensitive screens. Those of us with limited short range vision should be getting worried by these developments. Perhaps the science of haptics wil be our saviour. February 25th 2007
Censorship On The Internet
Some censorship of the internet is necessary. I fully support the removal of child pornography for example. But insiduous censorship by special interests is slowly creeping over the internet and eroding free speech. These special interests include web site owners who censor forum posts and business owners who deliberately remove competitors ads from public listings. |
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IPHONE APP DEVELOPMENT |
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Activeminds started off by developing regular websites. Almost from the beginning we were using databases to store most of the data and implementing administration user interfaces to allow site owners to add and maintain their own data. Not long afterwards we moved on to developing dynamic applications using AJAX and other tools to improve the user experience. This naturally led to the development of specific web based interfaces to software packages that allow users to interact with complex engineering simulations from any browser on any platform. Now we are moving on again to develop apps for the iPhone, iPad and other smartphone platforms (Android and Blackberry for now).
Developing for the iPhone has many challenges, not least that there is no automatic memory management. This is a huge step backwards for software developers. Releasing unused variables is something we haven't had to worry about for many years. The reason why this is necessary on the iPhone is because the platform is relatively crude in terms of its computing power. Consequently, the development environment has been slimmed down to the absolute minimum. Memory management isn't the only challenge of course. Apple developments use Objective C which is based on C rather than on something more modern like C++ (another step backwards). User interfaces are built using the Interface builder which is a little quirky but cuts out a lot of the bother about designing for different screen orientations, etc. And of course there's the problem of laying out a useful application on that tiny screen. It's a steep learning curve.
None the less, progress is being made on our first iPhone application, after a few false starts. Hopefully, the fruits of our labour will be available on iTunes soon. We are concentrating on serious engineering applications, having no interest in developing games or other trivia. Eventually we expect to be building apps that emulate the AJAX interfaces to engineering simulations we have recently been building.
There's not just the iPhone out there of course. We can't ignore the Android platform or the Blackberry. We started with the iPhone because that's the coolest and an iPhone app can easily be converted for use on the iPad. Once they're available on these platforms, we will convert them for the others.
So this is an exciting time for us. We like to try and stay abreast of the latest technology and are always ready to learn new stuff. We'll keep you informed of progress...
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