The Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized PC, is drawing a lot of attention - and justifiably so. It is cheap. Very cheap. From its main distributors it is available for around £32. This makes the device so cheap that it is useful in a great variety of use cases. Originally intended as an educational platform, as described in this insightful speech by the project's founder,...
Read MoreThe other day I wanted to add video playback support to Tabris. "Ha!" I thought, "Piece of cake." My fallback strategy was the normally well documented Android API and, as a last resort, Stackoverflow with the answer to almost any question you can think of. As it turned out, none of these assumptions were correct. While implementing the new video feature, I ran into some pitfalls...
Read MoreLast month I was researching options for writing multi-platform mobile apps in Java. Beside our own framework Tabris the Google Web Toolkit is an obvious option. When I started to dig a little deeper I stumbled upon Google's announcement at Google IO 2012 to go from "gatekeeper to peer" regarding the development of GWT. It was not really a formal announcement, rather it had been...
Read MoreOverall, mobile browsers are an appealing alternative to native applications: They support most modern web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, and you don't have to set up and learn using multiple SDKs. The technical limitations that do exist will hopefully get fewer as time goes on (or get patched otherwise), while performance and stability will improve. Sure, native apps will always have some advantages, but...
Read MoreApplication design and user experience has become one of the most important topics in the mobile/tablet/startup world. While some people claim the designer is the rockstar of the team i would still not sign the statement: "Design first". Rather i would say "User experience first". The design of the your application certainly is the very first thing people will face, but when the user experience...
Read MoreI love Android, but its default browser is terrible. For relatively simple, static websites it's okay, but i'm talking about complex HTML(5)/JavaScript applications here. And while Safari for iOs is considerably faster, it's has almost as many quirks and bugs. A great alternative to native apps or Flash this ain't (yet). My frustration comes from one specific topic I had to deal with, and that's scrolling...
Read MoreIf you need to get a matching UIFont object from a CSS definition like "font-family: Arial; font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold;" you have no way to do it with the API that iOS provides for three reasons. First, there is a non-API method on UIFont called +(UIFont*)fontWithMarkupDescription:(NSString*)markupDescription; that could do the conversion/lookup most of the time. Using it will get your App rejected by Apple. Second, the only...
Read MoreOn Monday this week we released Tabris 0.6.0 which is the renamed successor of our last RAP mobile release. Next to the renaming of projects and packages there were a few other changes worth mentioning. The caching of images in both native clients for iOS and Android has been vastly improved. Images are now fetched from a local cache on your mobile device instead of being...
Read MoreWe are happy to announce the availability of the Tabris SDK as a free download. Tabris, formerly known as RAP mobile, is a platform for building mobile apps for iOS and Android. Tabris is based on Eclipse RAP and offers additional mobile clients built with native widgets. Combining native clients with server-side apps makes app development simple for Java developers without having to sacrifice platform specific...
Read MoreWe are happy to announce another preview release of RAP mobile. Version 0.5.8 adds support for even more widgets on the Android side while improving stability and performance on iOS and Android. The new release brings improvements to the mobile client side but RAP itself has undergone some minor changes as well and we highly recommend that you update your target definition. The changes will also impact your server-side code...
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