The Wholesale Application Community is looking for your input

Posted on July 26, 2010 by cdelcol01

The Wholesale Application Community is looking for our feedback!

If you are a mobile developer, we would like to encourage you to take some time and provide your input through The Wholesale Application Community‘s developer survey.

What is the Wholesale App….. WAC for short :-) you might ask? The definition on their site describes them as follows:

“The Wholesale Applications Community has been established to increase the overall market for mobile applications. WAC will achieve this goal by encouraging open standardized technologies, driving scaled deployment of those technologies and providing complimentary commercial models. This will allow developers to deploy a single application across multiple devices (through the use of standard technologies) and across multiple operators (without the need to negotiate with each of them). WAC will provide the commercial enablers which will allow the developer to be paid for the applications which are then sold through any associated application store.”

However the blurb in the FAQ section of their site gives a better idea of who makes up WAC:

“The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is an open, global alliance formed from the world’s leading telecoms operators. WAC will unite a fragmented applications marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits the entire ecosystem, including applications developers, handset manufacturers, OS owners, network operators and end users”

So what? why should we care?

We think this is a great opportunity to raise our voices as mobile developers and have a chance to influence the direction of a new framework. WAC will be based on the JIL, BONDI, GSMA OneAPI, and W3C specs. WAC is taking a great step by involving the developer community early on in the process. Let’s take a minute or two and help shape what could be a great platform.

How often do we get a chance to give our opinions on a platform that will ultimately allow us to publish our applications to nearly 3 Billion consumers?

Filed under: BONDI, jil, Mobile, mobile widgets | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Mobile Widgets – Dynamic Layout Example

Posted on June 12, 2010 by cdelcol01

This is the third post in our on-going series on Mobile Widget development. The first two can be found here:

Mobile Widgets – Persistence Cross-Platform Wrapper
Mobile Widgets – a primer

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen many developers gravitate towards using Position: fixed in their CSS to pin their widget’s header and footer to the top and bottom of the screen respectively. Although this method does work, it’s not the best, nor do all mobile rendering engines support it. There also seems to be a performance issue with regards to rendering. Scrolling content will often make the header and the footer flicker (very visible on the Nexus One using the new Vodafone Widget Manager).

In this article, I would like to present a different approach to solving the same problem. This approach will attempt to also solve the following:

  • Allow for dynamic resizing when switching between portrait and landscape modes
  • Render properly on different screen sizes
  • Render properly on screen sizes with different PPI (Pixel Per Inch) densities (supported, but not shown here. You’ll need to use CSS media queries)

This layout should work for JIL Widgets, Opera Widgets, as well as plain old HTML5 mobile websites.

Let’s get to it!

(more…)

Filed under: jil, Mobile, mobile widgets, Opera, Ripple, Technical | Tagged: | 6 Comments »

Ripple Updates

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Pj Lowe

A lot is going on at tinyHippos Inc. and excitement is in the air. We are busy with new releases, new logos, and new support. We are also starting to sign up for some great mobile conferences in the fall. Stay tuned to our blog and we will let you know when and where you will be able to spot the Hippos in action and get a free personal demo! We also had the pleasure of an invitation to pitch our product to a group of investors (keep your eyes open for a blog about “The pitch adventure” from our CTO Daniel Silivestru).  Thanks to Communitech and our EIR Mark McArdle (@markmardle) for all your support!

If you haven’t noticed our new twitter avatar for Ripple (@rippleemulator) than check it out!   TinyHippos and Ripple have new looks to them and we are excited get your feedback on them.

A BIG thanks to CuteGecko for their amazing work.  We are thrilled with the new logos that they have created for us.

If anyone out there is looking for some amazing graphic and/or branding work – you should definitely check them out.  A must!

New Releases Posted:

V0.1.158 – June 7th, 2010

  • Bug fix: Persistence race condition, causing preferences to not save properly when widget first loaded.
  • Added update and welcome popup notifications to inform user of automatic updates.
  • Updated the Ripple logo.
  • Added ripple documentation. Can be found at http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/docs.

V0.1.137 – May 26th, 2010

  • JIL 1.2.1 – Added simple support for Widget.Device.DeviceStateInfo.AccelerometerInfo.
  • JIL 1.2.1 – Added support for config defined preferences.
  • JIL 1.2.1 – Added support for read-only config defined preferences.
  • Preferences are now widget specific. Preferences saved in one widget will not show up in another.
  • Minor CSS fixes for Notifications.

Filed under: Community, General Announcements, Ripple | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Beta: A walk through The Ripple Emulator’s features

Posted on April 27, 2010 by cdelcol01

The Ripple Emulator Goes Beta

Update: For a thorough tour of Ripple in it’s latest form, check out the Ripple Docs here.

Today is the day we launch the Beta version of The Ripple Emulator, a browser based mobile emulator. So we thought we’d explain the current feature set to help you get started and on your way to building and testing mobile widgets faster. Before we get started, here’s how you can get Ripple and what you’ll need to know to run it:

Download:

Requirements:

  • You need to have the Google Chrome browser installed on your computer. You can download it here if you don’t already have it: http://www.google.com/chrome
  • If you’re working with mobile widgets on your computer, you’ll need to run a local HTTP server. This is due to an upstream bug in WebKit and we expect this requirement to go away shortly

Getting started:

We’ve created a Demo Widget that you can load into Ripple. The demo widget will walk you through all of the features currently available in Ripple in a wizard-like format. All you have to do to get started is:

  • Point your browser to: http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/demo
  • Click on the Ripple icon at the top right of your Chrome Browser (once you’ve installed Ripple, of course)
  • Follow along, to play with all of the features available in Ripple

Stay informed:

Along with the Beta release of Ripple, we will also be adding to our online presence with some goodies and help for the widget development community. Here are the various ways you can keep up to date:

  • The Ripple Product Site (which will be launching in the next day or two): http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/, here you’ll find information on Ripple as well as a community forum where you can interact with other Ripple users as well as get advice and ask questions related to mobile widget development
  • This Blog: We will continue to post about new features, provide sample code, and resource to help the mobile widget development community
  • Twitter: follow the @RippleEmulator and @tinyHippos accounts

Features of The Ripple Emulator (Beta)

(more…)

Filed under: General Announcements, jil, Mobile, mobile widgets, Opera, Ripple | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Announcing The Ripple Emulator beta launch – 20 days to go

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Pj Lowe

Wondering what the tinyHippos have been up to for the past few months??  Well – if you haven’t had the pleasure of attending a local event in the Kitchener/Waterloo region where you would have been captivated by our demo…  then you are in for a treat!  The boys are finally ready to come out of stealth mode and show the world!

When are we launching?

On April 27th, 2010 tinyHippos will be releasing the Beta version of our “Ripple Emulator”.

Please join us for our launch party at The Barley Works in Waterloo, ON. Please get a ticket here as space is limited.

(more…)

Filed under: General Announcements, jil, Mobile, mobile widgets, Opera, Ripple, Startup | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

JIL Mobile Widget API

Posted on February 24, 2010 by cdelcol01

Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work building a product that will help mobile widget and mobile web developers better test, debug and deploy their mobile applications. We have started by supporting the JIL mobile widget platform but have been struggling with gaining access to the information we need as well as getting answers from JIL.

Since we believe in the JIL platform and the good that Mobile Widgets will bring to the market, we decided to try and help the community ourselves. We will start posting on a regular basis with any information we think will be helpful to JIL Mobile Widget developers.

The first step is to let everyone know that we’ve created an open gitHub repository into which we’ve checked in Beta 2, 3, and 4 of the full JIL JavaScript API (publicly available from JIL). We did this to allow us to easily see the changes that have been taking place between the different beta releases. The documentation that has been provided by JIL was lacking certain key changes and that was the driving force behind us taking this action.

You can read some more details on our post to the JIL.org forums here: http://www.jil.org/jil-forums/posts/list/307.page

The gitHub repository can be found here: http://github.com/tinyhippos/JIL-API

If you are a JIL Mobile Widget developer and would like to help out by contributing code snippets, advice, etc. Please let us know. We’re currently working on putting together an independent JIL developer community to help our fellow developers get the answers and help they deserve. We’ll blog about that very shortly with more details.

In the mean time, please fell free to leave us a comment here if you have any suggestions.

Filed under: Community, jil, mobile widgets | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Introducing… tinyHippos!

Posted on January 6, 2010 by cdelcol01

I would like to take a quick minute to introduce… tinyHippos Inc.

tinyHippos was born from a very simple idea… “there has got to be a better way!” That sums up what got us started on our current path. While spending hours, nay, days, testing our mobile widget applications and running into the standard set of frustrations: multiple emulators (some being very sluggish), no JavaScript debugging, no automated testing capabilities, and the list goes on, we decided to do something about it rather then sitting idly by.

We’ve decided to build a product that will empower developers to start taking advantage of the same luxuries available to web and desktop developers while developing mobile widgets and mobile websites that are meant to run on multiple mobile platforms.  We are currently hard at work on this product and hope to have it available for public preview by the end of January 2010!

If you’d like to get a preview, we invite you to join us at DemoCamp Guelph on Jan 27th, 2010 where we hope to unveil it for the first time (assuming our application is accepted ;-) )

What else do we do?

Since we are fully self-funded and are bootstrapping the development of our product, we also offer consulting in both the web and mobile space. Our team has a wealth of expertise on multiple development platforms including .Net, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and more.

Contact us to see how we can help you with your project.

Where are we?

We are located in Waterloo, Ontario

Why did we decide to make our site a blog?

We are firm believers in the power of the community and in the sharing of knowledge. We decided that the best way for us to share and give back to the development community is to have our corporate site be a blog. This allows us to share knowledge, code snippets, and anything that we think might be helpful to others in our field.

Let the adventure begin…

Filed under: General Announcements | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.