When I started out to explore mobile development, I was immediately drawn to the iOS mobile platform because I owned several generations of iPhone models. iOS seemed perfect to me because I used a variety of iPhone apps that inspired me to investigate mobile development. However it wasn’t until I delved further into mobile development that I quickly realized as a developer, that there was more to the basis of my preference than just the mobile device in my jeans...

GVSU MASL graduate assistant Juan Mejia spent his summer working in Redmond for Microsoft. In particular, Juan worked on Microsoft’s Window Phone. On Friday, September 21 Juan will be giving a “MASL Meetup” talk on his experiences working at Microsoft. Juan will be sharing his internship experiences by talking about what its like to work at Microsoft and how a very large company builds and ships a product like Windows Phone. The talk will also...

Fellow Michiganders, are you interested in broadening your mobile tech horizons this summer?  If so, you’ll definitely not want to miss the upcoming Mobile Moves Michigan Conference @ The Motor City Casino in Detroit Michigan on July 30-31, 2012.  The event, hosted by the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan, includes the Mobile/Wireless Technology Symposium (7/31), a mobile developer conference and Hack-a-thon (7/30 & 7/31) and mobile technology...

AppEngine Channels Google AppEngine Channels create a persistent connection between your client and the server running the Channel API Code. Information is passed between the two in real time without the use of polling, even between multiple clients, using the server as a mediator. For instance what if you wanted to create a Java client to use these channels to receive push notifications from a server, or to push data to android devices without the use of sockets...

I recently had the opportunity to work in Motorola Mobility’s Betaworks Lab as an intern, it was a great learning experience. One of my projects there was the inspiration for this project: get to run the audio fingerprinting library on an Android device. Echoprint (http://echoprint.me) is an open source C++ fingerprinting library that is available for desktop computers and iOS devices, however, as far as I know, there isn’t an Android-compatible version,...

Retailers around the world are scrambling to understand how the smartphones in the pockets and purses of their customers can be utilized in a meaningful way. When the web appeared on the scene in the mid-90s, many retailers quickly realized that the it offered a way to sell to customers that were not situated in a market in which they already had a bricks and mortar store. While these online virtual retail outlets can also be reformatted and accessible via mobile...

Social Check-In is an interesting mobile application genre that is getting a fair amount of attention from users. Foursquare, one of the most popular social check-in apps here in the USA, currently has around 10 million users. Even President Obama joined Foursquare this past August, which must really be giving the secret service headaches! Other social check-in apps such as SCVNGR and Gowalla are also becoming more popular. In addition to check-in to physical...