Software BlogRSS 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 August 6th 2012
Next Generation User Interfaces
User interfaces are always developing to embrace new ways of working; touch screens, voice, movement, etc. We need one way of developing these interfaces so that it is not necessary to write different code for different devices in different languages. It looks like HTML will now be filling this need with extensions to the latest standard. February 1st 2012
New Apple SDK For iPhone Apps
Apple's new SDK for iPhone and iPad devices contain many new features that make it easier to develop apps. There's a problem though, using the new features means ignoring half of all potential buyers. February 18th 2011
The Future Of Mobile Computing
The mobile operating system wars are about to start and the battle will be fought in the app marketplace. Will Apple win? Or Google? Or Microsoft? Or Blackberry? Or HP? 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. |
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NEXT GENERATION USER INTERFACES |
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Changes are always happening in computing. New devices appear with new features and new interaction methods are used such as touch screens, speech and movement. User interfaces have to change to keep up with these improvements, but how is a developer supposed to know how to future proof her application? It is becoming impractical to develop special program versions so that your software will run on multiple devices. We as developers need a way of producing a user interface that runs on many different devices with different screen sizes and resolutions and differing capabilities. And fortunately, there is a solution that makes sense which is good old HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language).
HTML is the language of the internet. Every web page uses HTML and every connected device incoporates a browser that can display that HTML. HTML has functions that allow you to find out the size and resolution of the screen being used. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used within HTML to determine how to display the HTML content and that can be different for different screen sizes and capabilities. All browsers have implemented AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML) that allows a web page to query the server and update a displayed page without needing to completely refresh it. HTML5, the latest version of the standard, has built-in support for playing videos and for constructing graphics. In short, there's not a lot you can't do with HTML5.
The limitations of HTML5 are in getting access to low level system functions which means that complex and sophisticated games can't yet be developed using HTML. But that too is being addressed. Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox browser have announced a new mobile operating system to compete against Android and Apple's IOS. The new OS exclusively uses an extended version of HTML5 for its apps rather than making developers write something specific for the platform. The extensions Mozilla had to make to HTML5 to get the necessary low level functionality have already been submitted to the W3C (World Wide Web Committee) to be included in the HTML standard and although it may take some time to get ratified, there seems to me little doubt that this initiative will prevail.
So at last, one way of building apps that will work on any device. There will be no more negotiating with Apple's iTunes before you can release an iPhone app. Recently, I had an app turned down by Apple because, they said: The app could be produced using HTML5. Well, it is already the case that more than 75% of apps on iTunes could be produced using HTML5 and recent developments mean that will soon be 100%. That day will not come soon enough for this developer.
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