All Posts in Mobile

March 12, 2014 - No Comments!

Play Background Music in Your IOS App

Something often overlooked is how your app integrates to the user's mobile experience. When listening to music and interacting with other apps, it can be a bad user experience for the user's audio experience to be cut off when your app has no use for a focused audio experience.

Here's a short code snippet to allow your user to play background music in your IOS App...

[[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setCategory:AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient error:nil];

February 25, 2014 - No Comments!

Open Game Center Preferences from within your IOS App

So we all know Game Center isn't ideal - if user's don't login at install time it can be hard to get them to login whilst within your app. Game Center is designed to stop presenting the Game Center login view after the user has dismissed it a few times. Short of giving the user clear instructions to login once this has occurred there isn't really any ideal solution to get your user to login once they have decided to do so.

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November 29, 2013 - No Comments!

Excited About Beacons and Bluetooth Low Energy

Beacons and Bluetooth Low Energy

Since Apple introduced iBeacon as the WWDC conference as part of IOS7 it'd be fair to say that it may be slowly passing under the radar, but for me as a developer I feel this will be one of the most exciting products of recent years. Already there are a few front runners producing the hardware to utilise this technology and the case studies they have developed are very clear and focused in how they will help the end user.

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May 3, 2011 - No Comments!

Blackberry Playbook… Were They Really Ready?

I received my free PlayBook a couple of days ago and wanted to share my own personal views on the device and development process. Now we all know this hasn't been the smoothest of journeys for these guys - with a lot of flack from developers...

First Opinions

First opinions of the device are good, looks nice, feels good in the hand etc. It's only after a little bit of use where the small things become apparent. Now those that know me will know I'm a bit of an Apple fan - I've had my issues with various Apple devices but for the inconvenience the rest of the package keeps me a happy user. Initial factors to note are the lack of email client (something that will be rectified soon) and I have noticed not all sites work on the device (e.g. The FWA). Being a Flash compatible device I was expecting the PlayBook to replicate web browsing on my main machine with a few usability limitations due to the the device's size.

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