June 1, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments
Location awareness is a powerful feature we often leverage when developing custom mobile Apps. Whether for delivering location-specific data, tagging user created content, or providing current position for mapping Apps, location awareness provides context and a personalized user experience. Frequent requests for location data and a high degree of position accuracy will both result in the device location services […]
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Blog posts and articles from Arter Kirkwood & Associates, a mobile app development company based in Alberta, Canada. Read the insights and findings from our top authors below. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or would like us to write on a particular topic.
Location Monitoring in iOS
June 1, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments
Location awareness is a powerful feature we often leverage when developing custom mobile Apps. Whether for delivering location-specific data, tagging user created content, or providing current position for mapping Apps, location awareness provides context and a personalized user experience. Frequent requests for location data and a high degree of position accuracy will both result in the device location services […]
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Can you still be agile when your customers cannot?
May 19, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments
The short answer is “yes”. Definitely, yes!! We follow an agile approach to mobile software development (Scrum, in particular). Occasionally, we find ourselves in situations where our customers are not able to be agile. The reasons vary but more often than not relate to established internal processes that must be followed, whether that’s willingly or […]
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Handling connection restore in iOS
April 30, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments
With very few exceptions, mobile Apps connect to services over the Internet to retrieve and send information. Since we have to expect the connection state of mobile devices to change frequently (switching between networks, in-and-out of cell coverage, etc.), responding to connection failures is a very common task. In many of our Apps we’ve found it […]
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Exception recreating Android Fragment after App dies in the background
April 16, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 2 comments
On a recent Android development project, we encountered a tricky, and at first difficult to reproduce issue. We would open the App, either from the recents list or the launcher icon, and the App would immediately crash. Start it again, and everything was fine. Digging into the logs, we found that there was a consistent […]
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Daily Scrums with Distributed Teams
April 1, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments
No different to any other business, we seek out the best developers to work with. Even if that means working with individuals from across the country or overseas, despite this creating challenges from a team collaboration and communication perspective. This can be that much more of a challenge when operating within an agile software development […]
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Managing custom developed iOS Apps for internal, company-use
March 15, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments
Deploying and managing proprietary, company-owned, iOS Apps within business can be a challenge with the myriad of Apple program and distribution channels to navigate (this a whole area of exploration in its own right and we’ll do just that in a future blog). Ensuring employees, customers, suppliers, partners, etc have the latest App features including […]
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Detect when audio playback begins with AVPlayer in iOS
February 28, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 4 comments
Update: February 9, 2017 – We’ve revisited this technique using Swift 3, and added a sample Xcode project you can download in a new post: Detect When iOS AVPlayer Finishes Buffering Using Swift Recently we’ve been working on an iOS App involving audio playback, and wanted to have an animation timed to begin when audio playback […]
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The “Key” to Server Authentication for Google Cloud Messaging
February 16, 2014 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments
Google cloud messaging (GCM) provides a framework for communication between an application server and client applications, including android mobile Apps. The three main components when implementing GCM for an android app are: GCM connection servers Application Server Android App client Google-provided Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) connection servers take messages from a custom Application Server […]
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How We Develop Mobile Applications
January 31, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments
At Arter Mobilize, we generally commission each mobile application development project with a concept design exercise that fleshes out the ‘look and feel’ of the App such that it’s form and function become clear and agreeable to everyone. Estimates for the time and cost needed to bring that concept to reality allows for the concept […]
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How We Fix-Price Work
January 14, 2014 / by Rick Arter / Uncategorized / 0 comments
Traditional fixed-price models call for fixing the scope of work before fixing the costs to deliver that work. This typically leads to design overkill as the team tries to understand every little detail upfront before feeling confident to declare a fixed price. Analysis-paralysis results, forever designing and never developing. And once underway, if the scope […]
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