The tinyHippos team is moving!

The tinyHippos headquarters will be moving November 1st, 2010.  We will now be located at The Tannery. No you won’t find us tinyHippos in the lush Tannery side along with the Big Wigs — YET!  But you can find us on the 4th floor of the cool side – the Artisan Wing.  We are currently finishing up the painting, trim and the electrical.  We are just waiting for the windows to be installed and we’ll be ready to roll!

Check out some pictures of the progress.

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Quit Yo Jibba-Jabba And…

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Editorial: Are Mobile SDKs Becoming Obsolete?

There is a growing trend in today’s mobile space, some would call this trend frustrating, even infuriating. That trend is the abundance of mobile SDK’s (Software Development Kits) out there today, and it seems like every new platform and runtime provider is rushing to put out their own SDK. SDKs are great if you’re building native applications and a certain tool set is required to build and deliver your application to your target platform. However, the world of mobile development is changing. Today, building mobile applications does not necessarily mean that we have to build native applications.

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Ripple V0.3.0 Released

It’s been a month and a half since our last release but we’ve made it worth the wait. We have been working hard on implementing a number of new features, bug fixes and best of all new platform support!

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Editorial: SDK Frustration – My Experiences with Android, iOS, BB, PhoneGap and others

Through my computer science university experience, my need to download SDK’s was limited. Much of our work was done in Java and so the biggest requirement was to download and install Eclipse and the Java JDK. I was fortunate to be able to take a course in iOS development at university as well (one of the best courses I took by far). The setup experience for iOS development is similarly simple. Just download and install the iOS SDK. XCode and all the other tools are automatically configured and prepared for you. You just open XCode and start coding. I found these setup experiences to be generally quick and painless. I recently needed to test a PhoneGap application in an Android context. I had never done so before and I, perhaps naively, expected the setup to do so to be equally as painless as I had experienced before. Wow was I wrong.

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The dorm room approach to running a startup

I had the privilege and pleasure of speaking to the new students at UW Velocity recently. I talked about “failing fast and often” as well as how we run things here at tinyHippos.  I focused on XP programming, TDD, and the importance of failing fast.

After leaving this great group of students, I got to thinking and remembering my university days. Back then I was quite poor and budgeting was a very important part of making it through the school term. I remembered a time when I was faced with making dinner for 5 people and our budget was a very strict $5. Now you might wonder exactly what we could possibly have eaten for $5? Well, we ended up having a great spaghetti and meat sauce meal and here’s how we put it together:

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jWorkflow: A JavaScript Workflow Framework

Dude Where’s my workflow?

While working on large javascript projects at tinyHippos we would commonly end up with a rather complex bootstrapping process where we need to execute a large amount of initialization code in a specific order. Some of this code is asynchronous and some is synchronous.

We would start out with a series of events and function calls to attempt to chain together the bootup but it would quickly become hard to inject in new tasks. This prompted us to use the tinyHippos mantra “There has to be a better way”.

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Some Observations On Asynchronous Programming In Client Side JavaScript

Programming operations asynchronously in client-side JavaScript can make life a lot easier. Lately, I found myself wondering what async truly means in this case, did some investigations and figured it would be worth mentioning.

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Ripple V0.2.4 – Released

We’ve been pretty quiet on this blog for the past couple of weeks but that’s because we’ve been really busy getting the latest release of Ripple ready. Today, we are happy to announce that we’ve released Version 0.2.4. You can see the full release log here!

We’ve added support for more JIL APIs and have also prettied up a few thing and did some work on increasing performance as well. We are happy to say that you can now load your widget in under a second :-) Here’s a little screen shot to show it of:

If you don’t already have Ripple and are looking for a better and easier way to test your mobile widgets, we invite you to take it for a test drive. It is 100% FREE while we are in Beta!

Happy coding… and testing… and debugging!

Thank you Vodafone

A quick shout out to Vodafone to say thanks for recommending The Ripple Environment Emulator to your developers on your Developers Tool Page.  Check us out!

You can also spot us this month in the Vodafone  Monthly Developer Newsletter. Thanks Guys.  Also note that Vodafone has released six more countries across Europe including dates for their upcoming  Developer Dev Days Tour.  Keep your eyes out for the tinyHippo team as we will presenting at the Germany and The Netherlands events in November!

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