Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category

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Can I Use Windows Now?

Posted in Industry, The Future   |   February 4th, 2010 By Colter Aaron

windows98od1 Can I Use Windows Now?

It seems everyone is Apple Crazy these days. Even myself. I actually shudder at times when I think about purchasing a new device from HP or Dell. Microsoft is for bankers, lawyers, engineers, and maybe those guys that only like to play video games with a keyboard, not me. Is that really true?

In these difficult times, like you, I’m trying to get the most out of my money, and I’m not so sure Apple products are worth their steep price tag. For example, I can purchase a basic Inspiron 11z for $400, but a Macbook Air starts at $1500. There’s no doubt that the Macbook Air is a superior machine to the Inspiron 11z, but is it better by $1100?

I’ve done quite a bit of music and video production at the professional level, and I wouldn’t trade Logic Pro and Final Cut coupled with a quad-core Mac Pro for anything in certain cases. But when I’m outside the studio and editing room, I’m finding less and less of a reason to pay such high prices when more and more of my personal, and even professional life, exists solely online.

Safari is no reason to stay on an Apple machine, most serious Apple users don’t even use it. Firefox and Google Chrome seem to be the standards for industry professionals. Even the beauty that was iTunes is beginning to fade as people turn to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Lala.com for their music entertainment needs.

Microsoft isn’t the only giant to topple anymore, and security risks are becoming more of a problem for Apple as they become more popular. Yet another issue resolved by storing data in The Cloud where a team of highly competitive trend-setters are making huge leaps forward in security and recovery.

It will be very interesting in the next two or three years to see if Apple can stay on top as consumers start realizing that brand identity isn’t as important as accessibility and cost.

With the cloud gaining so much traction it is about your browser not your hardware.

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The Cloud Is Better

Posted in Industry, Products, Programing, The Future   |   January 28th, 2010 By Spicer Matthews

500px Cloud computing.svg 300x208 The Cloud Is Better

When we say “The Cloud” – we mean web-based systems that exist on the forefront of user-friendly technology in a way that rivals standard downloaded applications.

The Cloud is already responsible for three of the most widely used applications in the world: Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube.  Each of these revolutionary platforms exist not as a program on your device, where the bulk of the content is stored in a limited fashion, but instead, these three platforms take advantage of the near-limitless capacity of the web.

No matter how much physical hard-drive storage you have, you will always find a way to fill it to capacity with data.  And while nanotechnology is making great gains in the way we store data, those advancements come at a cost no small-to-mid size business can afford, certainly out of range for almost any individual.

Think about if your computer or mobile device had to store every email, every photo, and every video you ever viewed.  Impossible, right?  We’re already past the point of thinking that our content must be stored completely on our physical device.

But that’s not the only advantage to working within The Cloud.

24 hour service, available anywhere.  As long as the Internet is available, your service is working, and if for a brief moment it isn’t, your aren’t paying for its recovery, unlike shackled systems that usually require in-house professionals.

The benefits don’t end there. Cloud-based systems are almost always cheaper, easier to access, and simplify user experience.

I’d be willing to wager that Google Docs, Calendars, and its Content Management are universally better than the narrow-focused programs your employer is currently using.  And not only are they easier to learn and use, but they’re incredibly cheap when compared to the software licensing rights for standards programs that offer the exact same service, often with less features.

Aren’t convinced working in The Cloud is just as good as using standard applications?  Then check out this video, showing how a web-based system mimics an application perfectly for iPhone:

With all that said, why are mobile apps the craze? Why are we writing sexy maintainable code for our web applications and writing unsexy hard to maintain compiled code for our mobile devices. Apple attempted to make the apps boom a web based boom when the iPhone first launched but the time was not right. With the growth of html5 we really hope more web apps pop up on mobile devices than compiled hard to maintain apps.

We are really excited about projects like jqtouch that are helping to bring web delivered applications to mobile devices easier, faster, and better than the compiled alternative. Take a look at the project here http://www.jqtouch.com/

jQTouch — jQuery plugin for mobile web development

The benefits, it seems, are almost endless. Don’t be afraid, embrace the change.

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Very Jazzed With Where Google Is Taking The World

Posted in Bussiness, Industry, Products, The Future   |   November 19th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews

ChromeOS windows Very Jazzed With Where Google Is Taking The World

Below is a quote from Techcrunch’s coverage of the Google event highlighting their ChromeOs. We at Cloudmanic Labs are so excited about ChromeOs. Google is taking computing to a place we have been cheerleading for for years. There is no reason to ever store files locally or have some beefy file server in the back of the office ever again. Great work Google!!!!

“In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.”

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Cloudmanic Uses Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile

Posted in Industry, Programing   |   November 17th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews

Web Programmer To Iphone Developer

At Cloudmanic Labs we have been playing around with iPhone development since the release of the Apple SDK. We all have many years of programing experience, computer science degrees, and an overall love of programing. However, our love is in scripting languages such as php or javascript. Objective-C is just not a fun language to program. We are web dudes!!! Overall, our conclusion was we are not going to write Objective-C code that we would be proud of and at the same time continue to maintain our web programing skill sets.

Don’t Feel Like Becoming An iPhone Doob

With the boom of the iPhone we saw a lot of web development firms drop everything and start programing iPhones. While we don’t blame them, the money is good, I think many of them made the switch way to quickly. We are seeing way too many poorly written iPhone apps and you can tell they were written by someone with a web programing background not an Objective-C background. We saw this issue early on and did not want that to be us, a company that jumped on the bandwagon way to quickly. So we started to looking at subcontractors to partner with to write our iPhone applications. At this point we have worked with a few and have not been very happy. All our applications interact with our web services. We need to hire a team that understands both sides. While we are sure there are many subcontractors out there that fit the bill, of the subcontractors we have hired there was a strong understanding of one side or the other (Objective-C Vs. Web Services). Frustrated, we started looking around for a solution that would allow us to deliver a rich and powerful iPhone app that interacted with our web services, without us losing our core knowledge base of web programming. We recently found a solution that we are really excited about…….

Drum Roll Please…….Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile

A well funded start-up called Appcelerator has a product named Titanium Mobile. Titanium Mobile allows you to write mostly native iPhone applications using javascript libraries that any decent web programmer is already an expert at, such as jQuery. The good folks at Appcelerator have created a javascript API to create native iPhone UI elements like table views, buttons, switches, sliders, and more. They also provide a javascript API to interaction with the hardware such as; camera, gps, touch screen and more. With this framework you can develop rich and powerful iPhone applications that can be submitted to the Apple App Store only using javascript/css/html. We have rewritten some of our Objective-C applications using Titanium and the development process was twice as fast. It was faster for two reasons. One, we know javascript way better then Objective-C. Two, programing in Javascript is way faster then Objective-C anyway.

Titanium Mobile is not for everyone. If we were writing a game or something I would not use Titanium. Titanium, in its current form, really nails down allowing a web app developer to create a mobile extension of their web application. If you are not doing anything ground breaking on the iPhone just building an application with normal native SDK controls Titanium will knock your socks off.

As of this writing Titanium version 0.8 is days way from being released. The product has been in beta for about a year now and they will have a full public release when they get to version 1.0 (or so I understand). With the the release of 0.8 we believe they have plugged all the holes. In our eyes this product is ready for real production use

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Database Migration Ruby on Rails Style With Codeigniter

Posted in Industry, Programing   |   September 26th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews

BrantaLeucopsisMigration Database Migration Ruby on Rails Style With Codeigniter

Just released a modification to Mat’as Montes’ Codeignitor Migration code.

http://github.com/cloudmanic/codeignitor-migrations

Description:

An open source utility for Codeigniter inspired by Ruby on Rails.

The one thing Ruby on Rails has that Codeigniter does not have built in
is database migrations. That function to keep track of database chages (versions)
and migrate your database to what ever version you need. Migrate up or migrate down.
With this library you can now do this. This library is not complete, please read
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Migrations for future needs and issues. This “fork” of
Mat’as orginal work just tweets somethings to work better in our projects. Both Libraries
are powerful and work in nearly the same way. Maybe someday we can create a joint project
with Mat’as or even better get this into that core of Codeigniter.

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