Andrey Romanov

Some time ago a proper functioning of program was the primary task of any developer, and it was really commendable to fulfill this requirement. But the time has passed, and now the program can be developed permanently for several years. It’s done by different developers, each of whom have no connection with the “before-I-came” stages of development process. For successful application development it’s necessary to know how does it work, and this requires reading and undestanding the code. Regarding the necessity of reading the programs and the fact that the computers’ performance increases rapidly, the primary task of proper application functioning is now becoming secondary, while the primary goal is code simplicity and the application’s ability to be changed.
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Tretyakov Ilya

Building is the necessary part of Android application development. In the simplest case building is changing the version and acquiring the signed *.apk file. It’s easily done with the popular Eclipse IDE.
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Nowadays most of the mobile devices have built-in GPS functionality. Android-based devices are one of the list. In this article we’ll try to describe the GPS functional insides as developers see it.

Contemporary mobile GPS receivers have quite significant restrictions, such as:

1. it takes a plenty of time to detect the coordinates from the cold start;
2. position refreshing rate and provider data need to be set manually;
3. high power consumption if high refreshing rate is set.

All these drawbacks are to be solved by complicated GPS software architecture. Existing Android SDK is not sufficient, and the standard API for GPS programming is far from enough.

On the other side, every application needs its own tuning and parameters setting, this includes provider (GPS, AGPS, wireless networks), refreshing rate, application behavior (reaction to coordinates change or receiving the current position).
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Introduction

How quickly can you create a fully-featured game for modern phone working under Windows Phone 7? What do you need for this? What difficulties can you face?

We will try to answer these questions during small game creation. To create a real world environment it will be a fully featured application that will be submitted to Windows Phone Marketplace.

We will review the full cycle of a game creation process beginning from the idea and ending with publishing the game to Marketplace, without omitting any detail of this process. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

When you develop Silverlight client application you face problems of its architecture organization and interaction between separate blocks within it. This structure should be understandable. It should be set up easily during the whole application life cycle. The Prism project also knows as Composite Application Guidance provides us with a great variety of tools to build enterprise level architecture of the application.

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Background

On October’12 TweetDeck published statistics for Android devices and OS versions gathered from their users. They collected the information about more than 35 thousands Android devices which run their twitter client. You can see their extremely interesting statistics here: http://blog.tweetdeck.com/android-ecosystem.

We decided to continue their investigations and fulfill the statistics with some data regarding screen resolution, memory and CPU timing of the devices listed. We gathered detailed information about top 50 devices with the highest number of users. We get the information about mobile devices from http://pdadb.net. You can see the details below.

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Today the Internet has a significant number of live web cameras available for everyone. Web cameras allow users to view video streaming in a real time or get specific frames upon request. However, the cameras can’t store video for some time period. This is obvious as calculating resources (disk space on server and processor time allotted for request serving) are needed for video storing or photo collections storing. We decided to implement this functionality in our project Enterra WebCam Viewer.
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Problem description

Articles about different patterns usually begin with pattern’s general scheme. Further, the author of article shows the particular usage of a pattern, as an example. Let me break this tradition and begin with a specific problem, which can be found in business applications very often.
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The article is based on the real experience in development of a certain mobile application which uses barcodes.

What are barcodes?

According to wikipedia.org, barcode – is " a sequence of black and white stripes, representing some of the information in a form, suitable for reading by technical means. There are several types: linear (conventional) – known as bar codes which are read in one direction (horizontally); 2 dimensional (2D barcodes) – known as symbols, designed to encode large amounts of information". The first can be seen on any product in the store, while the latter can be found in promotional flyers, business cards, magazines.
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Author: Dudarev Roman, Ph.D. of Engineering

Introduction

The article doesn’t pretend to absolute strict mathematical justification and completeness of the suggested algorithm. The article is a description of the solution Enterra Company got when developing cartographical system Enterra GIS for signing cartographical objects (i.e. buildings, constructions). The method can also be used for signing other objects.
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