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May 16, 2012
by Stefan
1 Comment

PagePlace CI/CD – Status 1

As you may know from this post, I am currently involved in a project at Deutsche Telekom, helping them to create a web based solution for their PagePlace eBook/PDF reader. Since there is no official tech/developer blog, I decided to start writing about integration and deployment of new features, bug fixes etc. on my own blog.

Note: This is by no means an official blog or a place to get official support, just my private drivel.
Note: CI = Continuous Integration, CD = Continuous Deployment

Your personal library

At http://mein.pageplace.de, you will now find your personal library after you logged in into your PagePlace account. If you do not have a PagePlace account (yet), you can click the right button “Zum Demomodus” (eng. “Enter demo mode”) to get a glimpse of what the library looks like.

The library holds all your bought/downloaded ebooks and PDF files. Clicking an item will open that publication in the PagePlace web reader. No download of any application necessary, just start reading directly in your browser (currently only works for ePub files, not PDF files).

Focus on content

To the reader, the most important thing is a publication’s content. To make it easier to focus on that content, all control elements of the web reader application will now fade out after a short amount of time. You can easily bring them back by hovering over them with your mouse cursor.

Full Screen Support

The web reader application now facilitates the W3C’s FullScreen API, if the browser provides it, that is. If the browser does support the API, you will see a small button in the top toolbar. Clicking that button will toggle between full screen view and windowed view.

Bug fixes

Additionally, we fixed a lot of bugs that should make it much more comfortable to use the PagePlace service. For example, navigating through various publications was sometimes not a great experience, but hopefully, it will be from now on.

What do you think?

I (and I guess it is safe to say the whole team) hope you like the new features and improvements. Feel free to leave a comment below with whatever is on your mind regarding PagePlace (again: this is not an official blog or support center).

If you want to send feedback through official channels, click the little speach bubble on the left hand side of the library view, fill out the form and click “Feedback senden” (eng. “Send Feedback”).

May 15, 2012
by Stefan
1 Comment

Mobilism 2012

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week in Amsterdam, NL, attending the second Mobilism, a conference that deals with one specific topic, but that in great detail: The mobile web (if you don’t like that term: The web for mobile devices). It took a couple of days to reflect on everything that happened there, but I wanted to share my thoughts about that conference with you.

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May 7, 2012
by Stefan
0 comments

SourceDevCon 2012

Being back from London, UK, where I attended SourceDevCon 2012, a conference dealing with mobile and desktop web applications, I thought, I share some insights about the conference with you.

Looking at the list of sponsors, it was pretty clear that a lot of talks were going to be about Sencha and their products, e.g. Ext JS, Sencha Touch and so on. Actually, that was one of the reasons for me to go to the conference. It gave me the opportunity to talk to the folks from Sencha directly. I heard people mildly complaining that the conference was too Sencha centric. Well, maybe they should have informed themselves better before going. The preliminary schedule clearly stated a lot of sessions would deal with Sencha related stuff.

Which brings me to … Continue Reading →

January 30, 2012
by Stefan
2 Comments

qooxdoo? Unify? Never heard of!

In case you were wondering what I was doing for the past couple of months, I have been part of a team within the Products & Innovation department of Deutsche Telekom – the PagePlace team, to be precise. PagePlace is a service where you can buy and read eBooks, eMagazines and ePapers. They offer a variety of apps for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android as well as a Qt-based desktop application. You can check them out at http://www.pageplace.de and follow them on Twitter.

But, and that is the good thing, they want to move away from having different apps for different platforms. They want to move forward and have a single web app for all of their supported platforms (Hooray!). That is where myself – and of course some other developers – come in. Our task is to create that web app (and once more push the boundaries of what is possible on the web).

While working on that project, I came in contact with two frameworks: qooxdoo and Unify. In my opinion, they are both totally underrated; in fact, I think not many people even know about them. I want to change that and, as a first step, give you a little introduction to both of them.

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October 25, 2011
by Stefan
0 comments

MobileTechCon 2011

Boy, time is flying by. It was almost six weeks ago that I went to MobileTechCon 2011 in Mainz, Germany. Anyway, here’s a quick recap.

Sencha Touch & PhoneGap

Just like at MobileTechCon 2011 Spring Edition, I gave two talks. The first one was about building cross-platform mobile applications using Sencha Touch and PhoneGap. It was the same talk that I gave six months ago and you can read all about it here.

Even though I got a lot of good feedback and some interesting questions afterwards, it felt like (most of) the audience expected some deeper insights into the frameworks and more practical examples instead of a high-level overview and some demos. It seems people know that these frameworks and tools exist and that they don’t have to develop native applications for every platform, but could use HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead to create cross-platform applications; and now they want to know how to do exactly that. If I give this talk again, I think I have to alter my slides first to reflect this changed expectation. Anyway, thanks to everyone who was there.

iEnterprise

In my second talk, I gave a high-level overview of how web technologies could be used to develop cross-platform business applications, especially for tablet PCs. I showed what is possible with the new HTML5 tags, e.g. audio and video, and what one can do with new CSS technologies like transitions and animations. I also demoed some WebGL and Canvas stuff.

Again, it felt like people expected more advanced stuff, which is good, because now that people seem to understand the advantages (and some minor disadvantages) of web-technologies for cross-platform development, we can do some serious stuff.

You can download the slides of both talks from either the download sections or SlideShare.

MobileTechCon 2011

This was the third MobileTechCon and just like the previous conferences the organizers managed to put together an interesting mixture of talks around mobile related topics: There were talks that dealt with the business/marketing side of things as well as talks around software development for mobile platforms.

What I said about last MobileTechCon, which took place in March this year, is also true for this one. So, to quote myself: “I really enjoyed my time at MobileTechCon. The atmosphere was great – to which the location hugely contributed -, organisation was good, food was nice and most importantly, lots of nice people to talk about mobile stuff. And, of course, it was nice to meet a couple of people I don’t see that often.”

See you all next time…