Strictly For My Readers!

Hey everyone!

I decided to write this post to say thanks to everyone who’s been reading my blog so far. I started MTR around a month ago, and it has been visited almost 10,000 times since then. What is very satisfying to me is that many people subscribe to MTR and watch for new articles. This means that you liked the content and found it at least somewhat useful. Thank you so much!

I am really motivated to continue writing articles for MTR. We will cover various stuff, such as loading OpenGL meshes from 3DS Max, porting native Unix libraries to Android, analyzing and modifying audio on the fly and so on and so on. Be sure to stay tuned.

Starting from this month, you can also find articles written by yours truly on WiseAndroid – along with lots of great articles written by other authors.

Right now, I would like to use the rest of this post to recommend to you some Android goodies that I learnt about from some of you guys – some of the readers of this blog who got in touch with me.

Xtify: A Free Push-notification Framework

Guys from Xtify Inc. are developing a wonderful client-server framework for push notifications. Basically, you can use their free SDK in your Android (or iPhone) app and get a full-blown solution for sending mass geolocation-based notifications to your users. For example, if you develop an app for a store chain, you can notify your users about hot discounts in the nearest stores. Or you can notify them about new stores opening near to the place they are visiting.

Notifications are managed from a hosted web console (Xtify is a SaaS solution) which supports common marketing abstractions such as rule-based “campaigns” as well as ad hoc notifications. At the same time, care is taken not to gather any personal information from the users.

In fact, Josh Rochlin, CEO of Xtify, was very kind to invite me to their office (located in the ever-inspiring area of SoHo, NYC), and gave me a short demo of the Xtify framework. What I really liked about their solution as an engineer, was those small but important things that distinguish a quality software product from just a solution for a business problem that can be sold. For example, if there are multiple Xtify-based apps on a single device, only one notification service will be running and it will support both apps. Also, the guys took care to have their framework use as little battery power as possible when running in the background.

iPhone support is there too, and there are already large customers that use Xtify. So if you feel this is relevant to your project, be sure to visit Xtify Inc. right now.

WireframeSketcher

From my own engineering experience, I know how important preliminary visualizations are. Especially in case of developing user interfaces, everyone has their own idea of how it’s going to look. This is usually solved using various kinds of diagrams, MS Paint drawings and, in case you’re doing it the professional way, using mock-ups.

WireframeSketcher, which was recommended to me by its author Petru Severin, is a cool Eclipse plug-in that allows you to mock-up various kinds of applications (of course, including Android apps). Mock-ups are schematic, intended to give you an idea of how the application will look, at the same time being clear and non-confusing.

Other mobile platforms, such as iPhone are supported too, as well as web applications. Give it a try!

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