With the Tabris 1.4 release approaching fast, we'd like to preview another nice addition to Tabris: the client side dialog. Creating a dialog has never been a big problem in Tabris but until now it lacked the visual fidelity to what mobile users were used to on their respective platform. The discrepancy originates from the fact that a dialog is a normal shell with standard buttons,...
Read More[caption id="attachment_20651" align="alignright" width="150"]Apple Swift logo is a trademark of Apple Inc.[/caption]Apple introduced the Swift programming language at its wwdc14 event yesterday. I spent some time digging through the language documentation. Here are my initial thoughts on some of the more interesting features. The language is much more concise. If you have a background in any C-based language (other than Objective-C), you will be able to...
Read MoreMany people can stick to consuming their content on digital screens, but there might be times when you want to have it on paper. Therefore, the upcoming Tabris 1.4 release will add native support for printing right from your mobile device. A Tabris client makes use of its platform specific approach to printing, which means that printing feels as natural as expected. On iOS we use...
Read MoreGoogle just announced their push into the wearable computing market with the introduction of Android Wear. Currently the main focus of Wear is to deliver rich notifications from your phone to your wrist. While that is great, Wear is actually a full fledged Android device (alas with a small screen). We took our Tabris swipe demo and with a few UI changes we made it a...
Read MoreThe upcoming Tabris 1.3 release will include visual improvements to the Tabris Android client. Most notable is an updated animation for the TabFolder appearance and an improved user experience when dealing with pages in the Tabris UI. TabFolder gets smoother The TabFolder always had a nice look to it but with the recent changes it also became more pleasant to use. Inspired by the tabs in the...
Read MoreLately i have been experimenting with the dart language a lot. Dart claims to be "a new platform for scalable web app engineering" and while that is true, it is also an interesting programming language. The following talk by +Bob Nystrom describes how dart relates to other higher level languages. It is a quick primer on dart but but also a history of programming languages. Highly entertaining...
Read MoreA few weeks ago I posted a blog post about how to create animations using the ViewOverlay introduced in Android 4.3. Fast forward to today and we have a new Android version: Android 4.4 (KitKat). This latest edition brings a set of new, animation-centered APIs called "transitions". +Chet Haase created a great dev byte series video explaining what transitions are and how they can be used. In addition +Mark Allison picked...
Read MoreTabris 1.2 will be released on December 6th with a huge set of new features. You can check out the roadmap to get the big picture. In today's post we'll focus on a feature we introduced as a result of a user request: the ability to change the overlay color of a modal shell. The overlay color is the area behind a shell when it is displayed...
Read MoreAnimations are an integral part of mobile applications. They make an app more enjoyable, emphasize actions and, in general enrich the user experience. While there are many ways to perform animations on Android, certain advanced effects are not always easy to achieve. Inspiration Inspired by the excellent Android Dev Bytes series from +Chet Haase and his recent blog post on ViewOverlay, other people have written blog posts about...
Read MoreEclipse offers a huge number of command line options to configure many aspects. Some of the more popular ones are: -clean If set to "true", any cached data used by the OSGi framework and eclipse runtime will be wiped clean. This will clean the caches used to store bundle dependency resolution and eclipse extension registry data. Using this option will force eclipse to reinitialize these caches. -data The instance data location...
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