I’ve moved my blog and and my hosting company. While this should be seamless, there may be a bug or two left in the moving. If you find anything feel free to call it out and let me know.
This blog post could also be “how to lower your stars in the marketplace”. I say this because now looking back at having an application in the marketplace for a few months I see many places that I have screwed up and things that I could do much better next time.
At the point of writing this I’m actually really happy with where Queue Manager has gone.
- Queue Manager has almost 50k users
- Queue Manager is listed highly in the Android Market
- Queue Manager is listed as the top Air for Android app on AppBrain
- Queue Manager is listed highly in AppAware
- Queue Manager is awaiting acceptance into the BlackBerry App World
- Android Central listed Queue Manager as a top pick in October and it was stated “it [Queue Manager] has proven to me the viability of Adobe Air as a development platform for Android”
I give every device at least a few hours before completely throwing it away. In that time it either proves useful to me or it doesn’t. If it isn’t, then it goes the way of the virtual boy – but if it is then I’m happy to keep it.
I’ll say now, the Samsung Galaxy Tablet is a keeper.
There have been some scathing reviews of the Galaxy tablet but for my needs I’m very happy with the tablet as a lightweight productivity device. When I first thought of the iPad – before ole Stevie actually announced it – this is what I thought of as a device. Cameras, Geolocation, Accelerometer, connections to the entire internet, lots of good apps, and a device I can program for. Based on that list Stevie has failed on multiple points.
I will say that I’ve spent time with the iPad and liked it – I’m not completely jaded. I just didn’t see any point to buy it due to many shortcomings at the hardware level. Software can be updated – with incomplete hardware you’re stuck and the iPad was incomplete. I know iPad round 2 will have cameras but the system will still be unfriendly to me as a developer and for that I’m still looking to Android based devices.
First thing – to all the haters. YOU SNOOZE YOU LOSE! No other conference that I’ve been to has caused for so many hate emails and texts from my friends. I think what got to them most is that, for most of them, they decided to not go for one reason or another and later regretted the decisions.
And regret the decision to not show up to Adobe Max 2010 you should!
I’ve been going to Max for a few years and this was the best one by far. Only since my first Max have I been so excited to pop out of my bed after a long night of “networking” and make it for the early morning sessions. This year the sessions were spot on, the technology was new and exciting, summit was great, and the keynotes were memorable – and of course the networking is the best you’ll ever have.
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The PersistenceManager is the data center backbone to your mobile Flex application. The reason you need to think about the persistance layer of your mobile app more than you needed to before in web and desktop development is because of the high probability of interruption and application closure.
In web and desktop development if something else happened on the user’s computer the user could simply switch windows to handle the interruption and continue their task. This happens so frequently that developers actually never think of this as a issue. However with mobile development there is always the chance of a phone call coming in, or email, or any other application that may take focus away from your application. While you application is not in immediate use you now fall prey to the operating system’s whim. If the OS decides that your application needs to close for memory or power reasons then the state of your application and any data it was holding may now be lost unless you have created an aggressive data persistance layer.
On top of that, the views within your application are created and destroyed quite frequently. That means if you were a developer that was used to grabbing data from offscreen or invisible views then your data will no longer be available when these other views are destroyed. Another reason why you need to be very aggressive about moving data into a proper data model and away from the view.
Getting into it let’s look at the PersistenceManager, what it is, and how we can alter it to do our bidding.
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I wrote a book detailing how to get into mobile development for Android, iOS, and QNX devices using Flex and AIR. You will learn all the in's and out's of Flex mobile development along with some advanced techniques utilizing ANEs, User Tracking, generating Ad revenue, ANT scripts and Unit Testing. Make sure to check it out!
