IST, Incremental Scenario Testing, story continues -April 18th

By Matthias Ratert

In October 2010 I have announced within this blog that the Incremental Scenario Testing Tool (ISTT) will be published as Open Source.

Since November the IST tool can be downloaded on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/istt.

To advertise this great methodology I have published an article in the Testing Experience magazine (http://www.testingexperience.com) in the December issue about Open Source projects. Listing IST on opensourcetesting.org pushed the public interest even more. And the results are amazing: Almost 500 downloads from 57 countries so far! Almost every day ISTT is downloaded. India seems to be most interested in the tool – 113 downloads until now means rank #1. US (52 downloads), Germany (46 downloads) and UK (24 downloads) are following. Even some people from New Zealand, South Africa and Panama have tried it!

However the feedback could be more verbose: 9 users on SourceForge like the project, but unfortunately nobody has written a review so far.

On the other hand the recognition of IST in Teleca is increasing. Couple of projects are investigating the usage or are already testing with the IST approach.

And the community is growing, I’m not the only one anymore developing ISTT further. Some colleagues from Lodz are implementing features needed in their project!

As you see, the methodology and the tool are continuously improved, we have published already 6 updates and the 7^th including cool new features is in preparation.

So just stay tuned or try it, use it, love it ;-)

for Flash digital creators -did you visit FITC? April 4th

by Peter Buth (UI Architect)

What started out as Canada’s Flash event about 9 years ago has become a world-wide event around Flash and related design technologies with around 50 events so far.

For the 4th time FITC (abbreviation comes from its origin title “Flash In The Canada”) is also held in Europe, namely Amsterdam. All kinds of Digital Creators meet here to learn about new technologies and to get inspired. This year’s FITC Amsterdam took place March 8th and 9th plus option for an additional full day workshop on March 7th. About 350 participants took the chance to meet each other - some maybe merely came for the 2 evening parties...

Flash Developer Evangelist Paul Trani and Flash Senior Product Manager Tom Barclay (both Adobe) presented a lot of hot stuff around what's up and coming to the Flash Platform. "Flash on devices" was the name of the ~6 h workshop showing how to design for multiple screens - meaning for different screen resolutions and even different platforms.

One part of it was Adobe AIR 2.6 for Android, which was just recently released for Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Besides some performance improvements related to scrolling, H.264 video and GPU accelerated animations also additional Android gestures, Bitmap Capture for StageWebView and support for iOS/iPad have been added, just to name a few enhancements. [Now even AIR 2.7 beta is available]

The second FITC day started with "HTMLArraaagh!" presentation by Doug Winnie (Principle Product Manager, Interactive Design, Adobe).

Recognizing that there is a shift in mobile technology towards HTML 5 & CSS3 he recently started to experiment with HTML5 which is often used as an acronym for using a bunch of new technologies like HTML5 Canvas (originally from Apple for dashboard widgets), CSS3 (especially Transitions, Transforms, Animations) and JavaScript. As mobile browsers already now quite well support them "they will be an important part of tablet and mobile web design today and in the future."

Adobe is also investing in new HTML5-related tools – see e.g. the Wallyby tool on Adobe Labs.

When talking about games Flash technology is a key player: Many know Flash based games like Farmville by Zynga. More than 65 million daily users on the Zynga gaming platform - with 14 million Farmville users per day - that's really impressive!

With 3D in Flash games it's getting even more impressive - currently many developed using Papervision3D. But there is more: Away3D (recently 4.0 alpha announced), Sophie 3D, CopperCube, Flare3D - just to name a few tools and engines.

Just recently Adobe also made a preview of "Molehill" available on Adobe Labs which is a bunch of low-level 3D APIs for Flash and AIR that use GPU-acceleration. Molehill shall be released within this year!

A separate session with Andrew Shorten (Senior Product Manager for Flash Builder) and Deepa Subramaniam (Senior Product Manager for the Flex SDK) was dedicated to the new and upcoming features in the Flex framework, the Flash Builder as well as the Flash Catalyst tool also enhancing the designer-developer workflow. Now also rapidly building RIAs for mobile devices – either using Flash Player or AIR runtime – will be better supported e.g. by offering special templates for mobile. Same as with the latest AIR release also Flash Player 10.3 comes with a lot of performance optimizations for iOS and Android platform.

Another device that Flash tools can be used to develop for is the BlackBerry Playbook - the 7" tablet device RIM announced last fall. As it's not yet available I chose to get first hand information by attend the session about "Building BlackBerry PlayBook Applications with Adobe AIR" by Sanyu Kiruluta (Team Lead for Developer Relations, EMEA at Research In Motion).

Taking into account the BlackBerry community with more than 55 million global subscribers and 300.000 registered developers (as of October 2010; mainly Java, some for web development) it seem sensible to also take BlackBerry devices into account when developing mobile applications.

The PlayBook uses a Webkit browser and fully supports Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.5. Besides HTML5 Audio and Video also Adobe Flash Stage Video as well as SQLite can be used.

RIM offers the BlackBerry® Tablet OS SDK for Adobe® AIR® as well as the Playbook Simulator and a lot of documentation for free.

Interested in developing for the PlayBook? Then go ahead and download the tools. I already did.

If you like to read even more – e.g. about multiscreen development – the entire report can be found here: http://www.teleca.com/FITC

More on FITC http://www.fitc.ca/ and http://www.fitc.ca/events/about/?event=115

CTIA , March 2011, Teleca findings -March 28th

By Frank Bisono, Teleca North America

Hello from CTIA 2011 in sunny Orlando, FL! As the Teleca team wraps up yet another successful industry event, we wanted to take the time to recap some of the best parts of the show. First, we had a number of great meetings at our suite across from the convention center at the Peabody Hotel. It was a great opportunity to meet up with some of our valued clients, new and old. We are feeling some great energy and excitement about what’s?coming in 2011…stay tuned for more success stories throughout the year. The show floor was also buzzing with excitement. Although a smaller?footprint than in previous years, there were a number of vendors showcasing their latest warez and plenty of industry announcements?of interest. If there was one theme for the show (aside from wireless andmobile), it was tablets, tablets, tablets and yes, 3D(again). Apparently 3D on the TV is not enough, it’s now coming to your mobile devices in a big way. The industry is absolutely obsessed with tablets and 3D at the moment and the pace of new releases doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Google’s Android Honeycomb OS made a big splash on several new tablets at the show. Big announcements came from Samsung, with new form factors in 8.9 and 10.1 inch offerings, in addition to the 7 inch tablet currently on the market. The final hardware wasn’t available for us to touch, but they had it on display and let me tell you, they are sexy. Even the pre-production test units (although chunky) felt quite nice. At just a hair thinner than the new iPad 2, the Samsung 8.9 and 10.1 inch tabs are a thing of beauty. In an unusual move, Samsung announced pricing for these new tablets starting with the 10.1 (16GB WiFi only) model weighing in at $499, exactly where the iPad 2 starts. The 32GB WiFi only model will run $599. The 8.9 inch (16GB) Tab will start at $469 and the 32GB model will come in at $569. LG hit the market with their T-Mobile ready G-Slate,offering the latest HD & 3D stereoscopic onboard cameras. Yes folks, 3D Cameras on a TABLET! Not to be left out of the tablet wars, Sprint surprised everyone with their new HTC Evo View 4G tablet on Tuesday, as well as their new HTC Evo 3D smartphone. For myself, the hottest release of the show was Verizon’s 4G (LTE) HTC Thunderbolt mobile phone. It’s a fantastic display of hardware running on Android 2.2 with LTE blazing fast data connectivity, 1GHz Processor, 4.3″ display, 8MP rear camera, 1.5MP front-facing camera, dual flash, 720p HD video, HTC Sense technology and even it’s own DLNA stack. Keep your eye on this phone; it’s going to be a scorcher! Last, but not least, there were plenty of examples of the latest emerging technologies. Everything from VMware’s entry into the mobile virtualization world, Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality to immersion haptics, which provide a more lifelike experience when using applications on mobile devices. The User Experience world is about to get incredibly interesting with so much capability in our design war chest. The mobile future is looking incredibly bright and Teleca is well positioned at the center of the mobile universe to take advantage of all these new technologies and experiences. Keep your eye on our blog throughout the year for more exciting news and innovations coming from Teleca’s world class Design and Engineering teams.

More pictures at http://www.bisonium.com/ctia-2011-orlando-its-a-wrap

LTE route to 4G migration

An article by G Krishna Kumar, "LTE route to 4G migration" has been published in the Hindu Business Line.

Read the entire article here >>>

Automotive goes open source - March 18th

By Thomas Buchner, a Solution Architect and Technology Manager for Automotive at Teleca

Automotive Industry finally looking at open platforms

With apps and open platforms used everywhere from mobile phones to tablets and set top boxes, the automotive industry finally is also considering open platforms as a basis of their infotainment products.

Traditionally infotainment systems were built on closed source systems like Windows Automotive or QNX. More and more of Teleca's automotive customers ask explicitly in their RFQs for Linux based alternatives like Android or MeeGo.

The reasons are many-fold:

• Reduced royalties for licenses
• Chance to source from multiple vendors
• Last but not least the need to have a platform with a large developer base.
  

While these reasons are perfectly valid, some lessons learned in the mobile industry need to be applied to the automotive industry as well:

Open Source software comes not for free. To build a successful product, a strong partner that is capable to create a solid baseline from public available sources is required. More so for automotive products with their increased demands on safety and reliability.

To make full use of the open platform, a dedicated SDK needs to be created that unleashes the functionality of the platform to developers.

The platform, be it Android or MeeGo must be adapted to the underlying hardware to provide a compelling user experience for scenarios like multi screen multimedia content viewing, e.g. viewing HD video on the rear seats while the driver is guided by the voice controlled navigation system.

Teleca heads these developments together with partners and customers. Are you interested in more info see us at next automotive event, SAE2011»

Contextual Computing – The next big thing in Mobile Computing?

By Tilman Bollmann

Location Based Services have come over us. Have they? LBS is certainly one of the most hyped buzzwords in the industry right now, and for sure combining location data with other personal information offers a huge potential for services and marketing. And also a huge potential for paranoia. But has LBS turned into a business already? In 2009 analysts were forecasting LBS revenues to exceed 12B USD in 2014, but little has been said about such forecasts recently. And in fact, in my personal surroundings no one is actively using LBS beyond navigation and geocaching. Why?

The last cold winter in Germany revealed one special drawback of modern smartphones: the capacitive touch screens simply don’t work with gloves. And this get’s us to the major weakness of LBS nowadays: I need to become active to make use of LBS where in fact it wouldn’t be necessary. My mobile phone knows a whole lot of things about me. It knows where I’m working, it knows where I’m living, it knows my appointments, so why do I actively need to look up the best train connection when I’m leaving the office in the evening?

Taking just the location information leaves out a lot of relevant information from the context of a user, which includes calendar information, time, weather conditions, mood, social network, physical activity and wellbeing, and so much more. Combining this information with the history, my phone should be very well able to predict what I want to do next and provide me with the necessary information, without me asking.

So I’m dreaming of an active idle screen on my phone that tells me my train is leaving from track 6 in 4 minutes, that the Chinese restaurant around the corner has a special lunch offer today, remind me that I have parmesan cheese on my shopping list when I pass the supermarket and tell me that a friend which I haven’t seen in years is coming to town tomorrow. And all this without me having to press any button on a tiny 3 inch touch screen with winter gloves.
Of course this doesn’t work right out of the box. My phone and me would need some time to get to know each other. It needs to learn my habits, my favorites, my routines. But once it knows this, it could literally become my “personal digital assistant”.

And a “connected context” could even take this further! My phone knows I need to be in Bochum by 9:00 am. So does my neighbor, who’s usually taking the car. Our phones could tell us and he could give me a ride. Of course, connecting contexts requires a lot of trust and shouldn’t be opened up to everyone. But on the other hand it offers huge potential for increased efficiency and a more sustainable conduct of life.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”, Mark Weiser, father of the term “ubiquitous computing”, said in his article “The computer for the 21st century”. Well, the computer for the 21st century appears to be the mobile phone, and it’s pretty ubiquitous already, but it’s still a dumb device that I even need to tell not to ring when I’m sitting in the opera. To weave into the fabric of my everyday life, smartphones still need to become so much smarter, and I’m going to work on it now. Will you too?

Let’s see who gets there first.

Apple iPad Launch Event Summary - March 2011

By Dmitry Shapiro

SURPRISE! Steve Jobs appeared onstage. I guess the rumors of his demise just lost some legs. He started off by re-capping the year:

· iBooks: 100M books downloaded in less than a year

· iTues, App Store and iBooks over 200M accounts created.

· 100M iPhones shipped

· 15M iPads sold in 2010 (9 months) garnering over $9.5B in revenue for Apple

· 65,000 iPad specific applications in the app store vs. 100 Android Tablet specific apps.

He is saying that the iPad is not a computer. It’s a Post-Pc device. For those of you who read my posts, that’s called a “PARADIGM SHIFT”. Educators are calling it the future of education and doctors are calling it the future of medicine. One thing I like about Jobs is that he highlights that DEVELOPERS (Not Apple) are taking the device to places they could have never imagined.

Now he’s introducing the iPad2……Yes, they’re ACTUALLY calling it the iPad2:

As I expected, it has the new, 1GHz A5 chip inside, which is a dual-core chip. The CPU is 2x faster and the graphics are 9x faster. However, it consumes about the same power as the A4 which means that the battery will last just as long (10 hours). Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t announce RAM. It’s got front and rear cameras. We all suspected the front camera, but he rear one is a surprise. It’s also got a gyroscope and is about 1/3 THINNER! It’s down from 13.4mm to 8.8mm. It’s actually thinner than the iPhone 4 and the weight is down from 1.5 lbs. to 1.3 lbs.

Most importantly (don’t know why this is such a big deal to everyone) IT COMES IN WHITE!!! It will support both AT&T and Verizon (without an external antenna). The price will also stay the same. What’s disappointing is that the memory units will still be the same: 16, 32 and 64GB. I was hoping for more on-device memory. It will start shipping on March 11 in the US and March 25^th in a bunch of other countries! Accessories include: HDMI video out and HDMI Mirrored Video Output. You will be able to output EVERYTHING YOU SEE ON THE iPad to your TV at 1080. (Just like Steve Jobs presents!! YAY for Demo’s!!!!). Unfortunately, there is no mention of USB or SD ports. It has VGA video recording up to 30 fps on the front camera, VGA-quality still camera and a rear camera with HD (720p) video recording up to 30 fps with audio and a still camera with 5x digital zoom and geotagging over Wi-Fi. You can tap to control exposure for video or stills. It also has a much larger speaker on the back. There is also an ambient light sensor. They’re also coming out with what they’re calling “Smart Covers”. This is a cover for the screen that will fold back for viewing and auto-wake or auto-sleep based on whether it’s open. It will be held in place by magnets. The micro-fiber screen cover will clean the screen every time you close it. When you see the photos, you’ll be amazed at how thin it is. It’s made of polyurethane.

Now for iOS 4.3……

It has dramatically improved Safari performance with Nitro Javascript Engine (2x faster). I also will include iTunes home sharing. Airplay will allow you to send everything to Apple TV. You’ll also be able to lock the orientation. It also will include Photo Booth. Also, as expected, it will include Facetime. They also introduced iMovie for iPad which will allow you to edit movies on your iPad and will sell as a $4.99 app. It’s very similar to iMovie for OS X. It will also include Garage Band as an app for $4.99.

So, my conclusion? If you need to output your iPad or want to capture photos and video with it (which is really hard if you haven’t tried it with a tablet before just based on trying to hold it up for the photo) then you definitely need one. If you want to run very high end graphics and edit video then you definitely need one. Will you feel completely left out with your iPad 1? No. You’ll be fine and if you don’t fit into one of the above categories, I’d wait for the iPad 3 which is rumored to be due out in the fall along with the iPhone 5 and OS X Lion.