Category Archives: Tutorials

BuildMobile: Building a GPS Enabled iPad Search App

Part of the appeal of mobile services is that they are relevant to where you are right now. Most phones support GPS and a connection to the network. And when you combine those you get a convenient location based service. In this example application we are going to create a backend service in PHP that an iPad application on the front end will connect to Continue reading

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BuildMobile: Waiting for Android: UrlJsonAsyncTask

Waiting for Android: UrlJsonAsyncTask Source code for this article: UrlJsonAsyncTaskTest on GitHub Download and install the Android app: UrlJsonAsyncTaskTest.apk (Android 2.2 or greater) You can also scan this QR Code to download it to your Android phone: Overview I can’t even count how many times I’ve had to load a ProgressDialog in Android, query JSON from a remote URL, and then return control back to the app once the query has completed. It’s an incredibly common control flow, and one I’m sick of doing over and over again. I’m sure I’m not alone. Continue reading

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BuildMobile: Mobile Web Apps: Quick Wins

As we move though the book, we’re going to meet some relatively complex code for recreating native effects and behaviors. Thanks to some (fairly) standard hooks and APIs, however, there are a few tricks we can employ to add a bit of pizzazz to our apps without having to do much work at all. 3.1. Nifty Links For security reasons, mobile web applications are sandboxed away from many built-in features of the mobile device; for example, unlike native apps, they’re not able to retrieve a list of a user’s contacts, or take a photo with the device’s camera (yet). Continue reading

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BuildMobile: Windows Phone 7 Navigation

Thumbnail What’s interesting about the development platform for Windows Phone is that it is based on Silverlight, which, as most of us are aware, was first and foremost a web technology. As such Silverlight supports a navigation model that maps well to the way browsers work with the ability to navigate forward to new pages and back to previous pages. In this post you’ll learn how to carry out navigation tasks within your Windows Phone application. When you create a new application in Visual Studio or Expression Blend your project will contain a number of files which define a basic Windows Phone application, see Figure 1 Continue reading

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BuildMobile: An Interactive Orny

This is part three of an ongoing series. You may wish to read or review the previous sections on iOS Development Basics and iOS Apps with Tasty UI . As the series goes on, we’re going to develop an application called “Orny”. Continue reading

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BuildMobile: Mobile Web Apps: Setting Up Shop

Thumbnail This is an excerpt from the upcoming book “Build Mobile Websites and Apps for Smart Devices” by Earle Castledine , Myles Eftos and Max Wheeler . Over the coming weeks BuildMobile will exclusively publish a complete chapter from the book, the chapter on Mobile Web Apps. Enjoy. Continue reading

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BuildMobile: How To Code an Android Widget

Thumbnail One often vaunted feature of Android are the Home screen widgets. The official definition of a widget, taken from the Android documentation is: App Widgets are miniature application views that can be embedded in other applications (such as the Home screen) and receive periodic updates. In practice, widgets are generally only used on the Home screen. Widgets can also be interacted with, reacting to touch events, although there are some limits on what can be done Continue reading

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BuildMobile: WP7 Push Notifications Part 2

So far we’ve looked at the importance of notifications on the Windows Phone platform along with the different types of notifications that are available to your application. In this post we’re going to go through setting up your application to receive notifications and how to actually send notifications. The first step in configuring your application to receive notifications is to register with the Microsoft hosted Push Notification Service. This is done by creating an instance of the HttpNotificationChannel class and calling the Open method Continue reading

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BuildMobile: Push Notifications in Windows Phone

In my previous posts I’ve referred to the notification system that comes with Windows Phone, specifically in reference to updating the Live Tiles on the Start screen. We’re going to jump in and take a closer look at how the push notification system works and the types of notifications that are available to you. Firstly, there are three types of notifications that your application can make use of: Toast Notification If you want to notify the user of an important event within your application you can send a Toast Notification. This notification is made up of two pieces of text that appear as an overlay across whatever application the user is currently in, as shown in Figure 1. Continue reading

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