Custom Application Development | Applied Information Sciences Blog

This post is the second part of an ongoing series on localization of iOS apps. Please read part one here, if you missed it.

While this post on the MacRumors Forum is a good tutorial for bringing Localization (L10n) to your iOS app, it’s a little sparse in detail, has some updates that change the process, and assumes a few steps. A couple of bugs have also been discovered that need to be worked around to successfully initiate localization in a new iOS app in Xcode.

Today I’ll attempt to clarify some of these steps, and dig into the minutiae that are important to a successful development and deployment cycle. What follows is an example of creating an app from scratch and adding localization features. Read More…

Terence Wiles

A global law firm gained a planning and billed-hours edge with a new custom SharePoint application, incorporating an intelligent data dashboard, developed by the experienced team at AIS. This custom-developed solution continues a rich history of success, as the firm views AIS as their IT project partner and a long-term extension of their team.

Background

The long-time AIS client is a top law firm with household name clients in the technology, financial, healthcare and retail industries. They staff more than 1,000 lawyers and offices in 12 cities in the United States, Europe and Asia. This client offers comprehensive legal capabilities for intellectual property, tax issues, real estate, bankruptcy, environmental, corporate law and more.

The Challenge

AIS was initially brought in to build the firm’s global intranet. The project, a SharePoint intranet application, was very successful and user adoption exceeded expectations. Around the same time, the firm hired another company to build a resource application for its main legal practice areas. But because of poor user feedback and bad performance, the application never made it to production. After nearly three years of time and money spent, the firm turned to AIS for help.

Click here to read the full case study.

Gregory Hill

With the increased globalization of the economy, there is an obvious need to create mobile apps that handle multiple languages in a clean and extensible manner. This is known as localization (L10n) in the software development community, and various platforms deal with it in their own unique ways. We will look at how iOS manages L10n here, and the decisions that have to be made in order to stay on top of a dynamic situation.

There are several resources on iOS L10n available, both in official publications by Apple, and some articles and blog posts written by members of the development community:

Apple provides a home page for Internationalization (I18n), with links to several additional detailed sources, including WWDC videos.
There is an excellent tutorial on the MacRumors iPhone/iPad Programming Forum that goes into great detail on both how to convert your app to handle L10n and managing the app on an ongoing basis.
For apps being developed to target iOS 5, using pre-Xcode 4.5, Ray Wenderlich’s blog provides a good starting point with this blog post.

This article will take a high-level look at what needs to be done to fully localize an app. Three follow-up articles will look at the nuts-and-bolts details of how to accomplish this through building an Xcode iOS app from scratch. We’ll look at creating an app with storyboards, and the process of configuring the project to localize these storyboards. Next, we’ll cover how to handle localization programmatically, if you find you have to manipulate text before displaying it. Finally, we’ll wrap the series up with a look at how to communicate with a web service and identify the language of the data you are expecting to download.

Richard Kearse

Let’s face it: Technology is migrating toward the cloud. Unless you have sensitive or secret data you can’t share with third parties, then you have no reason not to embrace it. In short, the cloud is affordable, effective, 99.9% available anywhere, has almost unlimited storage, and allows you to focus on matters other than keeping your network up-to-date — and all you need is an internet connection. Industry experts say that cloud computing will only continue to grow and expand over the next few years, which means companies will need to keep up, or get left behind.

The “Mobile Worker” (like you, maybe), is growing more dependent on answering emails and working on the go with a smartphone, tablet and laptop both outside and inside the office. With so many efficient devices and capabilities allowing coworkers to touch base at once, it would only make sense to have all of your data stored in one centralized location. Additionally, most cloud services, such as Windows Azure, provide a web interface. This means you can access your data on any device or platform that has internet capabilities. Read More…

Nick Ovuka

After watching demos on Power View I was excited to begin using the tool, as we recently configured SQL 2012 SSRS and PowerPivot with SharePoint 2010 for an internationally-focused client. But after playing around with my PowerPivot model in Power View, I realized the Map chart type that I had been so looking forward to using…was not available.

Turns out we had installed SQL 2012 but not SQL 2012 SP1. Power View gets a number of important upgrades in SP1, including much-needed filtering that’s missing from the earlier version, as well as my eagerly anticipated Map chart type. Read More…

Ash Tewari

Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is a client-side design pattern. It guides the structure and design of your code to help you achieve “Separation of Concerns.” Implementing MVVM requires a bit of a mind-shift in the way you think about the functionality of your application. It has a significant learning curve and requires some additional upfront effort to get started on the right path. But the benefits are significant:

Your code is easier to understand, maintain and troubleshoot.
You are much more productive when you leverage the frameworks’ (WPF, Silverlight, XAML, WinRT) built-in features like Data Binding, Resource Dictionaries, Dependency Properties, Routed Events, Commands, etc.
You can test your app’s behavior “under-the-skin,” avoiding the pitfalls and cost of testing at the UI level.
Your ViewModels afford testability. You can have unit test coverage allowing “Test-Driven-Development” and “Automated Regressions.”
Decoupling the View from the ViewModel in the way enabled by MVVM allows designers and developers to work productively in harmony.

Terra Gilbert

Technology is advancing rapidly, and with its advance comes new and useful ways to complete everyday tasks. In this post I’d like to talk about some of the benefits of replacing the paper- or desktop-based ways of an employee whose job is performed primarily in the field. (Home health workers or field service technicians, for example.)

Quality custom software that’s designed to meet the specific needs of a business is easy to adapt and should have minimal adoption time and training costs. Workflows that are built according to an employee’s ideal task flow should encourage thorough service calls and better communication flow in all directions.

As an employee who may have to make several service trips per day, mobility is essential. Paper can be completely eliminated, pictures no longer lost or need to be transferred by media card, forms can be filled out by simply speaking into a microphone and tapping on some check boxes. Signatures can be captured easily just by swiping a finger on a screen, bar codes can be read and captured. The possibilities for becoming more productive are expanding each day. Read More…

Rita Nordenman

I was rushing out of my house on a Thursday afternoon and my phone fell squarely onto the pavement. As I picked it up and gingerly turned it over in my hands, I gasped. The screen was cracked, utterly and completely. It was a moment so steeped in idiocy that I almost laughed at myself. If you drop a phone it breaks, right? Except that it hadn’t and I’d dropped it a million times before. Maybe this was just its time to die its little death or maybe this was a particularly horrible fall. Whatever it was, it happened and it was over.

Later, at the store, my conversation with the girl replacing my phone went a little like this:

Helpful Girl: So if you’re phone is backed up, I’ll delete everything on it and get you started with a new one.

Me: It is.

HG: Ok, is it backed up to the cloud?

Me: …

HG: (concern on her face) What did you do to back it up?

Me: My husband plugged it into the computer and made a copy.

HG: Ok, if you’re sure you have a copy…

Me: I am…?

Did I mention that I’m a Business Analyst for an IT company? That I used to recruit for that same company? That I regularly talk with customers about what we can do for them and how we can ease their pain points with technology-based solutions? If you’re rolling you’re eyes at me, that makes two of us. But as I’ve discovered, working in technology isn’t all about the technology, it’s about the people. Read More…

Vinita Agrawal

In a recent project, we routinely modify a site, save the site as template and use the solution created to create new sites programmatically. This has been working well for the client for last six months and we haven’t encountered any issues. Occasionally, however, we encountered a problem which prevented us from deactivating or activating the solution in the solutions gallery. To overcome this, we deleted solutions from End User Recycle Bin and Deleted End User Recycle Bin views.

But this time around, every time I created the solution and created a site using this new solution and template, my new site looked bizarre! For instance, one of the libraries didn’t have the All Documents view and defaulted to My Documents view. But if you modified the URL for the library (from MyItems.aspx to AllItems.aspx), it would display the documents. Another difference was that the text from all content editor web parts on list pages were missing. The issue is displayed in pictures below using a test site. Read More…

Arun Mudiraj

The recent announcement about the general availability of Windows Azure IaaS comes with the following key enhancements:

Remote PowerShell is enabled by default when deploying Virtual Machine using PowerShell.
Availability of trial images such as SharePoint in the image gallery.

These enhancements make it easy to deploy a SharePoint Farm in an automated manner using PowerShell scripts.

The goal of this blog post is to walk you through such a script. Read More…