Just a quick update after day 1 of the Xamarin Evolve conference. The Xamarin Mobile Platform allows developers to use C#, and the .NET framework (via the Mono cross-platform implementation) to build applications for iOS, Android, and Mac OSX. Resultant apps are near-native and there is a potential for some major code reuse, provided your application is architected accordingly.

First, the event itself: Overall I am very impressed with the production. Knowing that this is Xamarin’s first conference, I expected something short of the events I am used to seeing put on by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. ...

I was among the lucky ones to get a ticket to Apple’s sold-out WWDC this year and I’ll tell you right off that this post is not going to do much to lessen my (of course undeserved) reputation as Falafel’s Apple fanboy – but I mostly loved this conference.

The Keynote

Of course the WWDC Keynote is always a big deal, consumer oriented, the only part of WWDC not under NDA, and often used to launch new hardware and (in this year’s case) software.  Even knowing this, I underestimated how big of a deal ...

I’ve been to a lot of technical conferences, both as a presenter and attendee, so I feel at least somewhat qualified to offer my opinion of the recent Google IO conference in San Francisco. I am not here to enumerate the product announcements or offer my in-depth opinion on every topic, you can find all you want of that (and more) out on the web.  Instead I am going to try and convey the general feeling and impression I got from the event, colored with my years of experience in the software industry.

Geeks, gadgets, and giveaways...

 The Falafel Mobile Team is pleased to announce that Falafel 2 Go is now available in the App Store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  This application joins its’ Android cousin (already available in the Android Market) as a solution which allows our customers to view our upcoming training schedule, quickly view our Twitter Tweets, or read our excellent technical blogs – all very easily from their mobile devices.

http://itunes.com/apps/falafelsoftwareinc

Falafel 2 Go is a “universal application” where the same binary runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad in native resolution.  This is a preferred ...

The Problem

The UISplitViewController is the flagship iPad user interface element, as it allows your application to optimize the use of the large screen.  This control manages 2 views, usually a master view (for navigation) and a detail view (for content).  When in landscape mode, the controller shows both views side-by-side, and when the device is rotated to portrait mode, the master view is hidden and the detail view occupies the full screen.  In this case, the SplitView controller places the master view in a hidden UIPopoverController, and the common MO is to add a button to a toolbar ...

A very common UI paradigm in mobile development is the scrolling list of items.  You have all seen it: flick your finger up and down and the data scrolls by, touch an item and drill down into the details for the touched item.  Here are a couple of examples from our Falafel 2 Go app:

You can probably imagine this is a critical performance area for a resource constrained mobile device: there could be many ...

Yesterday evening, my Falafel pals at Microsoft Tech Ed asked for a barcode to display in the Falafel booth so that attendees could easily find Falafel 2 Go in the Android Market.  The popular format for doing this is something called a “QR Code”, a 2 dimensional barcode that can embed links, emails, phone numbers, and other digital media. 

At first I was thinking it seemed a bit tedious for an attendee to have to use their camera to find our app in the Android Market.  While the QR Code can be used to embed many types of digital ...

Today is an exciting day for me:  My first blog as a member of the excellent team at Falafel Software, a Falafel Mobile application hits the Android Market, and Steve Jobs even further solidifies my belief that mobile devices are now ready to handle the feature-rich, demanding business applications that Falafel Software will be delivering to our Enterprise Customers.

Falafel 2 Go

Falafel Software is pleased to announce that the Falafel 2 Go mobile application is now available in the Android Market.  Falafel 2 Go begins its’ life as a simple mobile application ...