Mobile Articles

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SEP Selected as a Nominee for TechPoint’s Innovation Mira Award

TechPoint has announced the nominees for its 25th annual Mira Awards, highlighting the most innovative companies, universities, and organizations in Indiana’s tech sector. The awards celebrate achievements across various categories, including the Innovation Partner of the Year. Nominees in this…
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Android Studio – Not Ready for Primetime

Android Studio is a new IDE that Google has released into Early Access Preview. It is based on the popular IntelliJ editor; the existing development environment relied on an Eclipse plugin. This was really exciting news for SEP engineers that have done Android development. In addition to more the powerful refactoring tools that come with […]
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Installing Open Source Android Libraries with Gradle and Android Studio

Android recently started advising developers to use Gradle as their build system for new projects. I don’t really keep up-to-date on the Java ecosystem – and I prefer working in dynamic languages – so I didn’t even really know what a “build system” constituted. All I could think about was nightmares from writing Makefiles in […]
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POP for Prototyping

Do you POP?  Maybe you should.  It’s a free prototyping app, currently available for iPhone but soon to be released for Android. POP is a super simple way to capture your wonderful pencil scratchings electronically and create a semi-functional wireframe that you can share with others. POP uses the camera on your phone (or existing […]
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Why HTML-based Smartphone Apps are a Bad Idea

I’ve long had this opinion that building smartphone apps by writing HTML and sticking it into a native app shell is a bad idea. I’m not talking about web apps, mind you; I’m talking about apps you get from the App Store or Play Store, but really just run HTML and Javascript. My two main […]
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What Mobile Platform Should We Target?

We often get clients interested in mobile solutions to their problems. One of the biggest questions they have for us is “what platform should we even target?” iOS? Android? Windows Phone 8? What about BlackBerry? Symbian? Firefox OS? How about Ubuntu Mobile? Do we even want something native, or is a properly tested and designed […]
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Passwords, P@55w0rD$, Schmasswords

I have too many passwords.  I admit that I don’t always use a unique password on websites that I rate low on my ‘do I care if I get hacked’ radar.  And, unless forced, I’m terrible at remembering to change them from time to time.  On the plus side, I don’t keep passwords on post-it […]
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Android UI/X – don’t go overboard with your list views

The Android ListView is one of the simplest UI widgets to implement.  There are plenty of ListView tutorials and examples, so I’m not going to talk about how to implement a list. Instead, I’m going to focus on the User Experience and ways to improve your lists. To see a really well implemented ListView, take […]
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Android AsyncTasks, for updating your UI

Last time, I talked about how to use Android Handlers for handling a blocking task in the background.  While Handlers are very powerful, they can easily get too complicated for larger tasks. This time, let’s take a look at the Android AsyncTasks. AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class allows to […]
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Get a List of Months by Locale in Android…

I was working with a client trying to decide on long and short DateFormats for an international mobile application.  (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) I wasn’t able to quickly find any documentation on the Java SimpleDateFormat strings by locale…so I did what any Passionate Programmer would do, and I wrote a method to do it for […]
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