iOS & Android Development

Pushy is a standalone push notification gateway, completely independent of GCM. It maintains its own background socket connection, just like GCM, to receive push notifications. The underlying protocol is MQTT, an extremely light-weight pub/sub protocol, utilizing very little network bandwidth and battery. We chose MQTT after comparing multiple protocols, including WebSockets and XMPP. Also, the fact that Facebook chose to implement its push notifications using MQTT is highly-convincing. A huge advantage of Pushy is that it's a drop-in replacement for Google Cloud Messaging. The code for sending a push notification (from the server) and receiving a registration ID is almost identical for GCM and Pushy. This makes it super easy to switch to Pushy after implementing GCM and having to ditch it for its instability. We charge $0.005 for each active device (number of devices connected to the service at least once during one month of period) every month. Do you have plans for iOS? A...

Nice JS text effect Gthibaud on codepen.io CodePen is a playground for the front end web. Show off your latest creation and get feedback. Build a test case for that pesky bug. Find example design patterns and inspiration for your projects.

Ty Smith and Yohan Hartanto are Software Engineers at Twitter. During the last Bay Area Gradle Users Meetup at Google, they gave a short overview of the Kotlin language and examples about how they are using it with Gradle. Benefit from other developers’ experience by watching this video. Gradle.org

Metaphor hängt wohl direkt der Medien-Bibliothek von Android zusammen und ermöglicht den Zugriff von außen auf ein Android-Gerät. In diesem Fall muss ebenso aber erst der Nutzer agieren, er müsste beispielsweise eine kompromittierte Webseite auf seinem Smartphone öffnen, welches mit Android 2.2, 4.0, 5.0 oder 5.1 ausgestattet ist. Daten könnten gestohlen werden, selbst der Zugriff auf Mikrofon und GPS eines attackierten Gerätes soll möglich sein. SmartDroid

Luckily ThoughtWorks had a process that was a bit different from the usual standards companies had back then. After a quick recruiter screening, they sent me three options of a code challenge, a small problem I could solve in any programming language I would like to use. My code submission would then be used during follow-up interviews, including a pairing session where a ThoughtWorker and I would try to extend my code adding a new feature. Phil Calcado Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

In today’s globalized economy you could be negotiating a joint venture in China, an outsourcing agreement in India, or a supplier contract in Sweden. If so, you might find yourself working with very different norms of communication. What gets you to “yes” in one culture gets you to “no” in another. To be effective, a negotiator must have a sense of how his counterpart is reacting. Does she want to cooperate? Is she eager, frustrated, doubtful? If you take stock of subtle messages, you can adjust your own behavior accordingly. In an international negotiation, however, you may not have the contextual understanding to interpret your counterpart’s communication—especially unspoken signals—accurately. Harvard Business Review

Zeplin is the ultimate collaboration tool between designers and developers. It cuts meetings in half and ensures that designs are implemented perfectly, however complex. Developers Lower the repetitive work, keep everything in sync Don’t lose yourself in folders, here they are! Get notified of design updates instantly via Slack Designers Design hand-off has never been easier Keep your style guides always up-to-date Don’t think on sizes, generate assets easily Discuss with developers, don’t miss anything Notify teammates about design changes instantly zeplin.io

Mit Android N bekommt Googles Mobilbetriebssystem eine Mehrfenster-Unterstützung. Die mit Marshmallow eingeführten Stromsparbemühungen werden weiter vorangetrieben, damit Geräte vor allem dann wenig Energie verbrauchen, wenn sie nicht benutzt werden. Außerdem unterstützt die neue Android-Version Java 8. First Preview of Android N: Developer APIs & Tools Google veröffentlicht erste Version von Android N

Now that the Swift Continuous Integration system is established and proven, we’d like to grant commit access on a more frequent basis to project contributors who have established a track record of good contributions. If you would like commit access, please send an email to the code owners list with a list of 5 non-trivial pull requests that we accepted without modifications. Swift Blog

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it was buying Xamarin , a company that helps software developers write applications for mobile devices. The price was not disclosed, but is believed to be more than $300 million. It is a deal that says much about the competition between Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to control much of the computing world over the next few years. [...] “The customers we are working with have a desire to build applications factories,” said Nat Friedman, the chief executive of Xamarin, who will oversee all tools development under Mr. Guthrie. “They all want end-to-end service, and this is a way to offer that.” New York Times

Motivation When implementing mobile apps connecting to a backend you usually write a client-specific middle-ware providing filtered or aggregated information from the backend. With GraphQL this comes out of the box. GraphQL Introduction At the React.js conference in late January 2015, we revealed our next major technology in the React family:  Relay . Relay is a new way of structuring client applications that co-locates data-fetching requirements and React components. Instead of placing data fetching logic in some other part of the client application – or embedding this logic in a custom endpoint on the server – we instead co-locate a declarative data-fetching specification alongside the React component. The language of this declarative specification is GraphQL. GraphQL was not invented to enable Relay. In fact, GraphQL predates Relay by nearly three years. It was invented during the move from Facebook's HTML5-driven mobile applications to purely native applications. It ...

In a nutshell, the Crosswalk project provides a generic WebWiew with the latest HTML5 feature support. It is based on the Chromium project. Enable the most advanced web innovations with the Crosswalk Project web runtime to develop powerful Android and Cordova apps. Problems addressed by Crosswalk With the platform variations in the market you are forced to assume that every Android WebView works differently. There are differences in: Which JavaScript APIs are available Support and syntax for CSS properties How your application's interface is rendered …and plenty more. You want to support as many versions of Android as possible, but it’s frustrating and time consuming. Advantages using Crosswalk Get consistent, predictable behavior by reducing Android device fragmentation. Use the latest web innovations and APIs. Provide a feature rich experience on all Android 4.0+ devices. Easily debug with Chrome DevTools. Improve the performance of your HTML, CSS, and Jav...

Customer feedback can help you understand what features to add, what features to get rid of, and where to direct your development efforts. Adding it into your marketing plan is a no-brainer. But mobile app companies have a unique challenge. When it comes to communicating with customers, they’re at the hands of Apple and Google. Because these two giants privatize your customers’ information, it’s impossible to get feedback in conventional ways. Unless your users create an account, you can’t email out a survey to a customer or email list, or search for your customers on social media. You have to be creative. Thankfully, mobile app companies have found savvy ways to get feedback from their users. In this post, I’ll explain how you can learn what customers really think of your app Ask for Reviews Use In-App Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys Savvy Support Communities Use Beta-Tests => Act Upon Mobile Feedback kissmetrics

Want to learn about functional reactive programming (FRP) on iOS? We created this guide to help everyone, from beginners to seasoned experts, learn how to leverage the power of FRP on iOS. In this guide, you’ll learn: Why you’d want to want to use FRP What FRP is How far can you can go with the power of FRP How to use FRP Who to follow to learn more about FRP Realm