The digest of news from the world of mobile development for the last week No. 6 (March 11-17, 2013)

    This week, a lot of news was related to Android - founding father Andy Hubin left the project, Google blocked AdBlock, Flurry found out how many devices the developers really need to support. In addition, there is an interesting case for promoting applications from Microsoft, according to a survey of PC Magazine, Windows Phone 8 chose the best mobile OS, Philips opened a development program for Hue bulbs, and ABI estimated that revenue from mobile applications in 2013 will reach $ 25 billion, 65% of which will go to Apple. In general, there is something to remember.



    iOS



    Text output in iOS: CoreText, NSAttributedString
    Rus
    Viber talks about text output on screen in iOS. At first it was conceived as a tutorial, then as a collection of non-obvious facts, but it turned out what happened ...

    Android



    Shooting Time Lapse video for Android
    Rus
    Let's write a program for creating our own films using the Time Lapse technique.

    Intel has released an Android version optimized for Intel chips.
    Rus
    The development team from Intel 's Open Source Technology Center has introduced a preliminary version of Android optimized for Intel chips. In other words, there is a version of Android that can be run on a desktop PC, laptop or tablet, on which you usually work with Windows. In addition, there is a tool that allows you to run both Windows 8 and Android on the same computer.

    Google arranges spring cleaning and ban AdBlock in Android
    Rus
    Google pleased all developers of applications such as AdBlock with the news that all their applications were blocked in accordance with clause 4.4 of the Developer Distribution Agreement.

    Android and Chrome OS on the road to unification: Sundar Pichai becomes the new head of Android
    Rus
    In the official blog of Google, co-founder of the company and its CEO Larry Page announced that the founder of Android Inc., and then the head of Google’s mobile division, Andy Rubin is leaving his post yielding to Sundar Pichai.

    Connecting Android sources to Eclipse
    Rus
    It turns out that the developers of Eclipse and Android provided an excellent opportunity to see the sources of our libraries (if they exist, of course) and use them to their full potential. This does not apply to cases when the library in the sources is imported as a separate project. All of the following applies to the case when the library is in the jar-file (this is how the Android API or JDK library is connected).

    Life Difficulties of Independent Developers
    Eng
    image
    Suppose you are an application developer and consider it necessary that your application be optimized to work on 80% of devices. How many different models of devices (including Kindle Fire, Galaxy SIII and others) do you think you need to support for this? The answer is 156.

    IDC: Android tablets will overtake iPad by the end of 2013
    Rus
    The surge of interest in small, inexpensive tablets will lead to the fact that device sales will exceed the initial forecast for 2013 and Android will overtake the iPad by the end of the year.

    Using Berkeley DB in the Android application
    Rus
    After a successfully completed stage of “Hello World” for Android, I decided to write for fun a simple Android application, the main functionality of which was to store some data set on the device. And I really did not want to work with SQL. I'm used to working with objects somehow. Therefore, after searching the Internet in search of compatible Android solutions, I found only one thing - Berkeley DB, an embedded database.

    Qt 5 for Android: preview
    Rus
    In this pre-release version, we focused on the experience of developers so that you can easily run and test your applications on Android devices. Although there is nothing stopping you from distributing Qt 5.1 applications through the app store, we recommend that you do not do this and wait for the release of Qt 5.2, because we want to improve support even more ...

    Windows



    The results of the promotion of the “Magnificent Eight Applications”
    Rus
    Microsoft shared the results of the promotion of the eight applications for Windows 8. The winners of the New Year application contest received a prize - the promotion of applications by Microsoft during the New Year holidays.

    PC Magazine chose Windows Phone 8 as the best mobile OS
    Eng / Rus

    PC Magazine based on a survey put Windows Phone 8 in first place among all mobile operating systems for user satisfaction.

    Cook MVVM for Windows Store-applications
    Eng
    When we started working on applications for Windows 8, we were looking for the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) template support library for this platform. We spent some time on the Internet in search of one, but in the end we accepted the fact that such libraries do not exist in nature yet (maybe we searched poorly, but now this is not so important). The answer to the question “what to do?” Asked itself ...

    Contests



    It began accepting applications for participation in the championship of developers Evernote Devcup 2013
    Rus
    Within the Evernote Devcup developers and designers around the world are invited to create products that can extend the functionality of Evernote, helping users to save, share and quickly access all the important moments in their lives.

    The Second Apps4All Mobile Application Competition
    Eng The
    second Apps4All Mobile Application Competition is held as part of the Apps4all.ru project, the largest community of Russian-speaking mobile application developers, and aims to identify the best developers of 2013. We offer 4 own nominations for mobile developers, 2 Google nominations and 2 Microsoft nominations for mobile applications.

    Development



    uMoove open view tracking technology for Android and iOS developers
    Eng

    uMoove has been developing the technology for three years and will be ready to license it to third-party developers within a few months.

    Philips launches Hue bulb development program
    Eng / Eng
    Philips Hue is a lighting system that changes the idea of ​​home lighting (multi-colored LED lamp with Wi-Fi module). And now this innovative system has an official developer program that allows manufacturers of third-party applications and equipment to continue what Philips started.

    Fuse Powered introduced the Fuseboxx 2.0 platform
    Eng / Eng
    The new service works on iOS and Android and offers analytical reports on user behavior in the application, information on user acquisition by sources of income, a service for A / B testing, an advertising service, etc. All in one SDK and (almost) free.

    How do we use smartphones or what needs to be considered when developing a mobile interface
    Rus

    When we create a mobile interface design, we know that there are some additional things that are worth considering - for example, that depending on the situation / context, users change smartphone interaction patterns.

    Intel System Studio - a set of software developers for embedded and mobile systems
    Rus
    In late February, Intel officially announced the release of Intel System Studio - a new set of tools addressed to developers of software for embedded systems and specialized devices: communicators, systems on a chip, car computers, industrial and medical devices based on x86.

    Introducing Marmalade Quick
    Eng
    Marmalade Quick allows you to write applications in the Lua language, which is now quite popular among game developers. Lua is tempting, it is a very simple and quite powerful language. The ability to connect such modules as: Cocos2D-x for 2D graphics, Box2D for physics and SQLite for local data storage, JSON for data exchange.

    Users do not tolerate buggy applications - only 16% will give such an application a third chance
    Eng / Rus
    image
    According to a recent Compuware study, the mobile app ecosystem will not be in crisis in the near future - most smartphone users (85%) still prefer apps to mobile websites. They believe that applications are more convenient (55%), faster (48%) and easier (40%). Of course, there is nothing surprising in this data - native solutions, as a rule, always work better. But the attitude of users towards unstable applications is interesting. 79% of respondents said that they would try to restart the application only once or twice, if for the first time it did not work properly. And only 16% said they would give them more than two attempts.

    Zynga: talking about cloning is a "distraction" - everyone does it.
    Eng / Eng
    Zynga has published an open letter from Zynga New York's General Manager Dan Porter to his staff, in which he explains his position as indicated at a conference speech on Friday. In his speech, Porter then said that his company, a well-known developer of social games, creating its own products copies the games of its competitors, and now he says that the press has taken his quote out of context.

    New Relic monitors the performance of iOS and Android applications
    Eng / Eng
    New Relic has launched a new service for monitoring the performance of native applications, which, according to the company, will improve user ratings in the app stores for iOS and Android.

    Finger control: looking for the perfect Rus interface

    Let's try to understand the intricacies of interacting with touch screens, and understand how to achieve such convenience and ease of control.

    Money



    Tapjoy: income on holidays is 50% higher
    Rus
    Tapjoy shared data on her income on holidays - Christmas, Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day. So, advertising revenue these days increased by 54% on Christmas, 44% on Chinese New Year and 34% on Valentine's Day. For example, the "leading retail brands" that advertised on the Tapjoy network for iOS and Android devices on Valentine's Day not only saw an increase in CTR, but also an increased conversion.

    The most successful mobile venture funds
    Eng / Rus
    Onavo Insights, Onavo's analytics division, has published a ranking of venture capitalists and their successes in the mobile space. Typically, VCs are ranked by exit cost, but measuring impact on the mobile world is probably best measured by the market share of applications, which is the best indicator.

    Income from applications in 2013 will reach $ 25 billion
    Eng / Eng / Rus
    The general trend is, says ABI, that monetization of tablets will overtake monetization of smartphones. By 2018, in terms of revenue, tablet apps will overtake apps for phones. And by this time, total revenue from applications will reach $ 92 billion.

    Crittercism Gets $ 12 Million to Develop English Bug Tracking System

    Crittercism is a platform for tracking errors in mobile applications, crashes, and performance. The company has received 12 million from Google Ventures in the round B

    Pressly received $ 1.5 million and opens
    Eng
    Company uses HTML5 and customizable templates to quickly create mobile websites. The company has been working on the tool since 2011 and is only now opening it to the general public.

    Conferences



    Facebook announces Mobile DevCons
    Eng / Eng
    Mobile DevCon will be held April 18 in New York, May 2 in London and May 7 in Seoul. DevCon's goal is to help developers better understand the social platform so that they can invest more confidently in creating Facebook-related apps. Apparently, the event will be devoted to discussing updates related to developers, but it will not be anything like launching Timeline or the Open Graph platform, as on f8. Most likely, these topics will be important for developers, but for the general public they will be of little interest.

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