Aspire Technology

Easy Find Realty

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:34:03 +0000

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BlackBerry PlayBook

admin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:38:41 +0000

I’m still waiting for my PlayBook. And while I am more than happy to be getting something for relatively nothing (a couple of hours of development time) I don’t understand RIM’s logic on delivery to developers. Modern smartphones and tablets live or die based on the applications available to end users. That being said, if you were RIM wouldn’t you want to ship development PlayBook devices to developers as early as possible? The latest I have heard from theBlackBerry forums is that they should ship this week, one full week after the consumer launch! There are many developers in my shoes with apps inBlackBerry AppWorld that have never been tested on a real device!

I have read the early reviews and most of them were pretty hard on the PlayBook. In lots of ways they echo the reviews of many other BlackBerry devices over the past year… great hardware, mediocre software. With those reviews in mind I wasn’t holding out much hope for the usefulness of my upcoming PlayBook. I have to say after about 20 minutes of playing with the PlayBook at Staples I came away with a couple of thoughts:

It s a pretty nice little device… the latest O/S build seem very fast. The UI is significantly better on the real device vs. running it in the simulator.
Without being able to test on a real device, my first app runs pretty well. I used the Staples device and downloaded it from the BlackBerry AppWorld. As I have mentioned before it is the poor cousin to the real app on the other platforms but it runs well and is stable. This was a nice surprise given the limited amount of development and testing time.

At this point all I have to do is wait… hopefully my PlayBook arrives soon and I can get to Version 2 quickly!

PlayBook Development

admin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:35:41 +0000

Just a quick post about my recent experience developing an app for the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook. I have definitely been spoiled developing mobile applications for other platforms. Once you spend some time in IDE’s such as MS Visual Studio and Apple XCode you realize the BlackBerry platform is not very developer friendly. On other platforms, when you want to build/debug/test your code you simply “Build (or Run) & Deploy” to the simulator and start testing. Not so with the PlayBook. Here is a snippet of the command line scripts I had to figure out to deploy an application to the simulator for testing:

zip -r ApplicationName *
bbwp/bbwp ApplicationName.zip -gcsk 123456 -gp12 123456 -buildId 22
bbwp/blackberry-tablet-sdk/bin/blackberry-deploy -installApp -password 123456 -device 172.16.13.129 -package bin/ApplicationName.bar

All of that from a command line just to build and test my application in the PlayBook simulator. And about the simulator… How developers are supposed to test real code for production release on a simulator that isn’t fully functional is beyond me. In order to get an app I ported to run, I had to remove all the functionality that made it even a little bit interesting. Why would you release a simulator that doesn’t allow a mobile application to test core functions such as GPS, accelerometer, etc? But then again, BlackBerry is releasing the PlayBook to compete against the iPad without a built in email client. I guess in the rush to get it out certain things just had to be dropped. That being said, I am still looking forward to getting my hands on one … It is a BlackBerry so build quality and feel will be top-notch… Too bad they can’t get their software game together.

Mobile Development

admin — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:34:22 +0000

It is an exciting time to be a “smart device” developer. There is so much opportunity in the mobile world to create applications that open up new and exciting possibilities for large corporations, mid/small business and consumers. We are currently developing a number of projects in the mobile space (unfortunately details are under wraps due to contractual/NDA restrictions). What we have started to work with (and love) is the ability to mix native and web application development together on the current crop of smart devices. While the tools that enable this are still in their infancy, one can start to see the progression towards a new and exciting paradigm in mobile development. Toolkits that allow web applications to be compiled as native apps allow beautiful HTML UI design to be mixed with functionality previously only available through native code. Being able to tap into device functions such as GPS, camera, accelerometer, gyro, barometer, contacts and 3d graphics via HTML5 and Javascript is amazing. We are not far off from being able to write device agnostic applications that can run from the web or download from an “app store”. Being able to target iOS, Android, webOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry QNX or any other modern OS with one common codebase is pretty exciting for a development shop tasked with supporting any number of these systems. If you are curious about rapid smart device development, contact info@aspiretechnology.ca.

Still Going Strong…

admin — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:15:00 +0000

It has been 4 months since releasing my first iPhone app through the Apple app store and the number of downloads and usage continue to grow. For anyone interested, a local referral business (local to the Greater Toronto Area) contracted my company (Aspire Technology) to build them a geolocation based application to front their web based directory. After months of development we released version 1.0 to the Apple app store and a month later to the Android Marketplace. We are currently developing version 2.0 which will bring some interesting upgrades and enhancements. Stay tuned!

App Development

admin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 15:00:31 +0000

Web Development

admin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 13:00:56 +0000

Consulting Services

admin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 09:00:35 +0000