The day began with a keynote address in which Apple updated developers on the growth of the app store to its current mark of 500,000 apps and 18 billion (with a B) downloads.  One of the key points in this address was that 8 of those 18 billion downloads have come in the last few months.  So, the market for apps is accelerating.  In addition this is happening world-wide.  A good way to realize more value from an app is to localize it for other countries.

After this presentation, the breakout sessions offered some depth on a number of different topics.

Modern UI tools

Xcode 4.2.1 and the iOS 5 SDK offer new features for developers.  Storyboarding allows for more rapid construction of user interfaces.  The new UIAppearance API allows easy customization of on screen controls so apps can distinguish themselves through graphical design.

iCloud Storage

iCloud Storage enables your apps to keep user documents and data in iCloud, so your users can access the same content from all their computers and iOS devices.  This session gave a practical understanding of how iCloud Storage works and how to take advantage of it in an app.  iCloud allows an app to store key-value data, UIDocuments, CoreData, and even individual files.  Adoption of iCloud storage is not difficult and in many cases can be accomplished in a short time.

AV Foundation

The AV Foundation session was a practical introduction to the core concepts of this high-performance audio and video playback, editing, and recording API.  This API offers tremendous low level control over presentation of media assets form within an application. For example it is possible to merge two videos with an application at runtime to offer seamless playback as though the two videos were in a single file.

Location Features

Geofencing enables pinpointed geographical context within an app.  The Core Location framework by using region monitoring and geocoding to create a narrowed location-relevant experience for users. In iOS 5, the Core Location now adds the ability to do forward geocoding (translating a street address to a latitude/longitude coordinate).  Previously an application had to rely on external web services to do this.  The newest development tools also allow developers to test an application as though it was in any part of the world to anticipate scenarios users will encounter.

Printing

iOS has an advanced printing system that’s designed for easy adoption by developers. This session covered the architecture of AirPrint, guidelines for print layout, simple printing of images and text, and advanced techniques for apps with sophisticated printing requirements.  Printing capabilities can be added to an app with very few lines of code.  Applications with rigorous printing needs will require more, obviously, but the use Page Renderers allow an app tight control of what is committed to paper.

While most apps built for a phone platform can run on tablets, it is best to optimize their graphics and code to run on their larger counterparts.

Users do expect a different experience when using a mobile phone, vs. a tablet, vs. a lap top or desktop computer. More and more business users are also adopting tablets, with that, they are going to want to do more than just check e-mail, surf the web, and play some games. They are going to want to be productive, checking in on their CRM system, looking at production lines, and responding to customers; essentially they are going to want to be just as productive on the road as they are in the office without having to take their entire laptop with them.

That means more apps like dropbox which allow them to share files, or video conference services.

Think about the products and services that you currently offer for your customers, and think how can they be enhanced with a mobile app designed to run on an iPad or Android tablet.

Venturebeat.com put together this infographic on the adoption of tablets. Here are some interesting facts:

• 75% of all workers will have some sort of mobility associated with their job in 2011 (All Accella employees work from home)
• 1 in 3 online consumers in the US will be using a tablet
• In 2011, 61.3% of tablet users were using Apple’s iOS. (I’m curious to see what this number is at the end of 2012…I’m thinking it will be much less than 50%)
• 30% of IT shops are piloting or planning custom tablet apps (Start planning yours today)

Give us a call today at 888.856.2664 to discuss your app ideas and we can help you start building it for the iPad, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile OS.

While the video reports talks about a student at the School of Visual Arts Interaction Design Program creating the designs for an app which can’t be built yet due to limitations of smartphones at this point, Google has several apps for augmented reality. These include Google Goggles and Google Sky Map, which allows you to point your phone at the sky and see a over-layed map showing different stars and constellations.

Here is a list of some top Augmented Reality Apps from iPhoneNess. A lot of the apps mentioned are for navigating or layering information over what you see through your phone’s camera screen. I am very interested to see what new apps come out that take full advantage of augmented reality.

What are some of the top apps you have used that take advantage of augmented reality?

The article discusses what makes a good app developer along with some of the skills that app developers need to have in order to be successful.

One of the interesting points comes at the end of the article where the author, John Platt, discusses where the field is going. While some fear a 90s style tech burst, many see the field continuing to grow as more companies find new and innovative ways to utilize mobile applications, not to mention the greater adoption of mobile devices.

Read the Full Article in Today’s Engineer

A video from CNBC talks about Facebook and how it is cashing in on online advertising, specifically from companies outside the top 1,000 advertisers.

Accella CEO, Jason King, was recently interviewed on Maryland Public Television’s “Your Money & Business” about the surging world of Mobile Applications. What is a mobile app, how does one begin the process of developing.

The interview starts around 0:56 if you want to jump past the intro.

The segment, which lasted around 8 minutes, just scratches the surface of mobile applications. We’re hoping to return to the show in the spring to discuss more about mobile apps, and perhaps what it takes for a company to go from concept to launch.

This past weekend I spent some time playing around with Linux Mint 12. Last week, Linux Mint’s approach to the Gnome2-Gnome3-Unity fiasco was highlighted multiple times on slashdot.org. Linux Mint seeks to blend the aspects of these desktop environments into something that people actually want. They’ve given you the choice of which version of Gnome to run, and subsequently, the choice of which way you want to use your desktop environment: application-centered or task-centered. Anyway, it was a pleasant experience to fiddle with the ‘Lisa’ release candidate.

Without further commentary:

How to Create a Linux Mint 12 Bootable USB Drive

I based my exploration of creating a bootable USB drive on this post about Linux Mint 11, the process is essentially the same. I didn’t have any luck with the Startup Disk Creator, though, so I went with UNetbootin. Additionally, you don’t need to edit any configuration files with the below process.

1. Download UNetbootin

You can get it from it’s homepage on sourceforge or if you run Ubuntu or Linux Mint as your OS, run this command:

$ sudo apt-get install unetbootin
2. Grab one of the CD releases from Linux Mint.

I used the 32-bit iso without codecs, so that’s the only release for which I can vouch.

3. Insert your USB drive
4. Erase everything on your USB drive or format the USB drive
5. Open UNetbootin
6. Select the Diskimage option, the ISO option and insert the path to the iso you downloaded.


UNetbootin screenshot

7. Select the Type of drive (USB) to which you’re writing and enter the path to that drive

See above image. Note: your path may be different.

8. Click OK

UNetbootin should create your bootable USB drive for you!

9. Insert the USB drive into the computer you’d like to boot into Linux Mint 12
10. Restart the computer with the USB drive inserted

If your computer’s boot order isn’t set to start with USB, you’ll have to enter the boot menu. This is usually done by hitting the F12 key as soon as the computer starts and before the ‘Starting Windows…’ screen or any other screen shows.

11. Hit Enter or Wait…

If you’ve successfully booted from the USB drive, you’ll likely get a prompt that looks like this:

SYSLINUX 3.63 Debian-2008-07-15 EBIOS Copyright (C) 1994-2008 H. Peter Anvin
boot:

You can simply hit enter, and that will trigger the UNetbootin menu. If you don’t do anything, within 30 seconds UNetbootin will take over and give you a menu for selecting which item on the USB drive to boot.

12. Select ‘Start Linux Mint’

Ta da! That’s it

Web technologies are always improving, and at an enormous rate. The web is moving in a way that makes it possible to do things natively in the web browser where one once had to rely only on external scripts or images. This is a very exciting concept to modern web designers and front-end developers. Things like CSS3 give web browsers support for gradients, rounded corners, drop shadows, and other design elements previously only achieved by using images. Modern browsers also include support for transitions and animations using only CSS.

Check out this cool little nugget, made by Dan Eden, called animate.css (make sure you view the demo page in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox). Dan has compiled a great selection of animations using only CSS3 transitions for you to use. Simply add the animate.css stylesheet to your project and add a class to your element. It’s that easy to create awesome animations that use native web browser technologies.

One of the main benefits of using CSS transitions and animations over things like jQuery and other Javascript libraries is better performance. This is due to the fact that they are native to the web browser and can take advantage of hardware acceleration – the use of the computer’s hardware to perform functions – whereas external scripts cannot. In addition to this performance boost, CSS animations will generally look better since they can use hardware acceleration.

However, don’t get too crazy using only CSS animations. There is one major drawback and that is cross-browser compatibility. Currently the only browsers that support this technology are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Microsoft has promised support for CSS transitions in Internet Explorer 10, so it will one day be a reliable cross-browser technology – just not right now. It’s important to provide a fallback using a script like jQuery for those browsers which don’t support CSS transitions.

Sadly, for Google, that excitement was very short lived. Within a few hours the backlash on Twitter and other social sites showed a lot of disappointment in the app. Apparently the App contained a “Bug” which caused some large issues with notifications. According to Mashable “When launched, the Gmail app displayed an error that read: ‘no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application.’ This error appeared to refer to push notifications, such as displaying the number of unread messages on the app icon.” (We were unable to download the app as it was only up for a few short hours).

To think a company like Google, with the billions of dollars in the bank, and countless developers and engineers on staff, would release an app which had bugs, and many flaws according to its users, is quite mind blowing.

It is not uncommon for our clients are surprised to see the amount of time that we spend on testing and debugging to make sure that an app works cleanly. It is something a lot of our competition, especially overseas developers, do not spend as much time on. While code can look clean and seem to function right, it’s very important to test it out in different environments, on different devices, and with different operating systems.

I mean, if Google, with their seemingly never ending resources, can mess up, pretty much anyone can. So make sure that when you develop your app you spend an adequate amount of time testing.