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Showing posts from January, 2016

Windows Phone is dead

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Thank God for that.  Now I don't have to answer all those "so why do you not provide an SDK for Windows Phones?" questions..... Check out the original article here

How long will it take for headsets to become more than a novelty?

Virtually there: the hard reality of the Gear VR original article here

MobileFirst Command Line

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Whilst GUIs are great and have become the "norm" for most people, inside and outside of IT, there are still some things that certain IT ( system admins ) prefer to do from the command line. Mostly, these are repeated tasks that they can script or automate, passing parameter variables as needed.  This means they can spend more of their valuable time scanning twitter or f**ebook or reddit ( only kidding, they have much more valuable things to be spending their time on....like VR research! ) With this in mind the question comes up quite frequently: " can we script that? " With MobileFirst Platform Server, you have the ability to run ANT scripts to manage deploying your runtime .war files into Liberty Profile and even WebSphere Application Server.  This is usually fine for developers to run these tasks when they need to, but mostly they have no real idea of what is happening behind the scenes.  All is great, if it all works fine.  If for some reason you get a BUI

Virtual Reality for 2016

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Apparently, I'm getting an Oculus Rift (again! ....long story...) Although the docs state that you need a PC to do the development work, I've just found that the Mac OSX SDK and Runtime are still available.. (huh!hum!....download whilst you can) I'm sure the official SDK will come back in a short while. After checking out the Mobile SDK , I noticed that there is a Samsung GearVR headset that runs from your Samsung S6 phone, now that's more like it: Android coding! and here are the instructions to setup your Mac for the Mobile SDK . It might be time to purchase a Gear VR from Amazon , get my hands on an S6 (I thought I had an S5, turns out it's an S6!!! Woo!hoo!), okay, I have the right equipment.  Time to setup the Mac and see how far I can go with development before having to purchase the actual Gear VR... I'll naturally do a write-up article when I do start developing....watch this space. Then it'll be time to test out some apps from

Bluemix Demo assets

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IBM Bluemix allows you to build all sorts of Mobile apps much quicker and leaner than if you were to start from scratch. See for yourself what building Mobile Apps using Bluemix is all about. With a few clicks and some lines of code, you are able to: manage push notification subscriptions authenticate users monitor app usage store and sync your app data (offline to online) from your client code run custom app logic in the cloud get indoor location from beacons, wife and small clients trigger actions with indoor location information gain insights with customer interactions add natural language and image recognition to your app to make it personal Once, you've got yourself up to speed with the architecture and how you can now call Bluemix Services from your Mobile app, you might want to see some more in-depth examples of how to use more of the Bluemix services. Fortunately, there is a website that now offers you just that.   Bluemix Demo Assets .  Check it out