Android Lollipop for SAP: Innovapptive is Delivering Apps on the Next Era of Android

In an era of rapid communication through mobile and hand held devices, Android has forged one step further to come out with the latest version of its operating system – Android 5.0 Lollipop. This release comes with new features for users as well thousands of new APIs for developers. It offers level of extensibility – from phones, tablets and wearable to TVs and cars. Innovapptive will be releasing it’s first apps on Android Lollipop for SAP in Q1 of 2015.

This blog tries to addresses some of the core features of the Android Lollipop without getting into detailed technicalities.

Some of the core features of Android 5.0 Lollipop are:

• Material design
• Performance focus
• Notifications
• Support for TV
• Document-centric apps
• Advanced connectivity
• High-performance graphics
• Enhanced audio capabilities
• Enhanced camera & video
• Android in the workplace
• Screen capturing and sharing
• Advanced sensors

MATERIAL DESIGN

Android 5.0 offers material design to Android and provides you a comprehensive toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps. The built-in activity transitions lets you seamlessly migrate from one state to another with beautiful animated motion. Buttons, checkboxes and other touch controls in your app have been configured to support ripple animations. With RenderThread (a new system managed processing thread), you can render smooth animations, even where there are delays in main UI thread.

PERFORMANCE FOCUS

Android 5.0 enhances computing experience (faster, smoother and powerful) greatly utilizing its new ART runtime to support a combination of ahead-of-time (AOT), just-in-time (JIT), and interpreted code. It is supported on ARM, x86, and MIPS architectures and is fully 64-bit compatible.

With assurance of smoother performance, Android 5.0 offers enhanced A/V sync, wherein the audio and graphics pipelines have been incorporated for more accurate time stamps, letting video apps and games to display smooth synchronized content.

NOTIFICATIONS

Notifications in Android 5.0 ensures high level of visibility, accessibility and configuration capabilities. You can enable varying notification details on the lock screen and also have the flexibility to allow none, some or all notification details to be displayed on a secured lock screen. Important notification alerts such as incoming calls are displayed in a heads-up notification – a small floating window to help you in responding or cancelling notifications without leaving your current app.

COMPLETE TV PLATFORM

A unique feature that is added in this version is the provision of a complete TV platform to enhance your app’s big screen experience. This lets users to discover content easily offering personalized recommendations and voice search. Simply stated, you can now recreate big and bold experiences for your app or game content and support interactions with game controllers and other input devices. Android provides a lensback UI framework in the v17 support library to help you develop 10-foot UIs for television.

DOCUMENT-CENTRIC APPS

Android 5.0 offers an all new Overview space (previously called Recents), which is more versatile and enables multitasking. Now APIs lets you display separate activities in your app as individual documents along with other recent screens.

You can leverage concurrent documents to allow users to instantly access more of your content or services. For instance, you might use concurrent documents to represent files in any productivity app or chats in a messaging app.

ADVANCED CONNECTIVITY

Android 5.0 adds new APIs that lets apps to execute concurrent operations with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This enables both scanning (central mode) and advertising (peripheral mode).

High-performance graphics

With support for Khronos OpenGL ES 3.1, it now provides games and other apps with the highest possible performance for both 2D and 3D graphics on all compatible devices.

ENHANCED AUDIO CAPABILITIES

With a new audio-capture design, it offers low latency audio output. This new design consists of a host of features that includes fast capture thread that prevents blocking, except during a read operation, fast track capture clients at native sample rate and channel count & bit depth.

ENHANCED CAMERA & VIDEO

Android 5.0 comes with a powerful camera APIs that enables you to capture raw formats such as YUV and Bayer RAW and manage parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity and frame duration on a per-frame basis. This new camera enables you to capture uncompressed full resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on all compatible devices.

ANDROID IN THE WORKPLACE

To enable bring-your-own-device (BYOD) for enterprise environments, a new managed provisioning process has been provided that creates a secure work profile on the device.
For company-owned devices, IT administrators can commence with a new device and configure it with a device owner. Employers can then offer these devices with a device owner app already installed that enables configuration of global service settings.

SCREEN CAPTURING AND SHARING

With this new version, you can add screen capturing and screen sharing functionalities to your app. Once you have the user permission, you can capture non-secure video from the display and send it over the network, based on your requirements.

ADVANCED SENSORS

In this new version, a new tilt detector sensor lets you improve activity recognition on compatible devices and a heart rate sensor helps in capturing the heart rate of the person, who accesses the device. Enhanced interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions like wake up gesture, a pick up gesture and a glance gesture.

We have just now looked into the core features of this new version and how this new version would greatly enhance the overall user experience in terms of processing speed, ease of accessing applications, user productivity, enhanced audio and video capabilities, without compromising on the security aspects.

Contact us today to learn how you can leverage our custom mobile development accelerators to convert your enterprise apps to Android 5.0 Lollipop. Read more here – Custom Application Development. Contact us by sending an email to sales@innovapptive.com

Innovapptive Partners with SAP to Deliver Top Quality Enterprise Mobile Products – The mPower™ Apps Suite & Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS)

Innovapptive Inc. is a leading SAP certified mobile application development and services partner, with global reach. The company provides end-to-end SAP mobile solutions through a wide range of pre-packaged enterprise mobile products and flexible and agile delivery models. Innovapptive’s core product offering is the mPower™ AppSuite and it’s partnership with SAP to ensure all pre-packaged mobile apps complete a rigorous SAP certification process. The SAP certification process allows Innovapptive to deliver products of top quality, trust and assurance and our collaboration success story was featured by SAP. The certification has made it easy for Innovapptive to support market-leading solutions from SAP and offer integrated solutions to its customers.

Click here and Read the detailed article on how Innovapptive and SAP are partnering together to deliver a suite of top quality pre-packaged mobile applications.

Why is SAP Certification important to Innovapptive?

Certification supports services around third-party software integration into SAP, which helps Innovapptive to aim at their top strategic objectives to empower people anywhere and anytime with simple and real time access to information and processes. With a certificate of assurance of quality from SAP, deploying developed products and managing customers are easier. Successfully engaging in the certification process offered by an enterprise mobility leader such as SAP helps Innovapptive validate internal best-practice and quality standards.

Innovapptive SAP Partnership

Benefits of Certification to Our Customers

Increased trustworthiness of customers as the SAP certified products provide a seal of trust and assurance to deploy our mPower™ Apps Suite.

Through long–term strategic planning in co-relation with SAP, Innovapptive is well positioned to delivery top quality enterprise mobile products and services to our customer base.

Innovapptive not only certifies its mPower Apps Suite with SAP, but also certifies its proprietary tools, accelerators and rapid deployment methodologies with SAP. The unique combination of certified enterprise mobile products and services from SAP helps Innovapptive delivery high value business outcomes for our customers. SAP Integration and Certification Center has helped drive higher customer adoption of both Innovapptive products and services and has enhanced credibility as a leader of enterprise mobility solutions.

Innovapptive’s 2014 Outlook with SAP

Innovapptive is aiming at strengthening quality standards and integration of functionality of our entire mPower™ Apps Suite.. Innovapptive currently has over ten mobile apps certified by SAP and is focused on certifying an additional twenty mobile apps in 2014, making Innovapptive a distinguished SAP partner with the highest number of certified mobile apps in the SAP store. Innovapptive, in 2014, strives to continually make a distinguished presence at the SAP store, making remarkable change in capturing potential customers, who opt for the quality certified apps. With a clear road map, gigantic support, certification and partnership, Innovapptive is committed to delivering high business value and accelerate our customer’s time to market with its innovations in 2014.

How to migrate app to iOS 7 using Appcelerator

Apple’s recommended steps to update your application to iOS 7. iOS 7 introduces many UI changes, such as borderless buttons, translucent bars and full-screen layout for views.

THINGS EVERY APP MUST DO:

• Update the app icon. In iOS 7, app icons for high-resolution iPhone and iPod touch are 120 x 120 pixels; for high-resolution iPad, app icons are 152 x 152 pixels. (To learn more about all icon sizes, see “Icon and Image Sizes”.) Note that iOS 7 doesn’t apply shine or a drop shadow to the app icon. And, although iOS 7 still applies a mask that rounds the corners of an app icon, it uses a different corner radius than earlier versions of iOS. See the iOS 7 Icons section below.

• Update the launch image to include the status bar area if it doesn’t already do so. This is a difference of 20 pixels in height, that is, the image is stretched 20 more pixels if you do nothing.

• Support Retina display and iPhone 5 in all your artwork and designs, if you’re not already doing so.

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.createNavigationGroup

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.NavigationGroup

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarStyle

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarHidden

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.showStatusBar

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.hideStatusBar

• Titanium.UI.setOrientationModes

How to migrate app to iOS 7 using Appcelerator ?

IOS 7 BEHAVIOR CHANGES:

Button Bar and Tabbed Bar:

On iOS 7, Apple changed the style of segmented controllers, which effects what can be customized for the Button Bar and Tabbed Bar objects in the Titanium SDK. You can no longer set the background color or style of these objects. iOS 7 only supports one style and setting the tint color.

In Release 3.1.3 and later, with iOS 7 and later, when you set the background Color property for these objects, you will be setting the tint color, and the style property is ignored. For iOS 6 and prior, the background Color and style properties still works the same since these are supported on older version of iOS.

Navigation Transitions:

On iOS 7, when transitioning between two windows in a navigation stack, the bottom window slides half way off the screen,  pauses then the top window appears. This is noticeable if you do not specify a background color for your top window, which makes it transparent. As long as you specify a background color for the top window, the application will appear to transition the same as previous iOS versions.

On iOS 6 and earlier, the bottom window would slide off screen as the top window appears on screen at the same time.

Lightweight Windows:

On iOS 7 and later, all lightweight windows, including the first root window, are displayed as full screen with a transparent status bar. Lightweight windows are windows without a navigation controller, that is, not contained in a Navigation Window or Tab Group. Any view objects added to the top of the window appear behind the transparent status bar. If your UI layout relies on the top property, you may need to readjust your layout.

You can also either set the full screen property to true to hide the status bar or set the top property to 20 to move the window below the status bar to compensate for this behavior change.

Status Bar:

In Release 3.1.3 and later, the status bar is controlled by the current window that appears on screen. By default, the status bar is displayed unless you specify the Window’s full screen property to true before opening the window. You can also control the appearance of the status bar using the Window’s status Bar Style property (new API element for Release 3.1.3). These properties can also be set on any top-level container, which include Navigation Window, Split Window and Tab Group objects.

Prior to Release 3.1.3, if you created a full screen window then opened a window without specifying the full screen property. The recently opened window would also appear full screen. In Release 3.1.3 and later, since the default value is to show the status bar, the recently opened window displays.

On iOS 7, the status bar cannot be controlled on the fly with Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarStyle, Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarHidden, Titanium.UI.iPhone.showStatusBar or Titanium.UI.iPhone.hideStatusBar. You need to either set the fullscreen property to hide the status bar or statusBarStyle to change the status bar style before opening the window. In Release 3.2.0, you can use the statusBarStyle property to change the status bar style on the fly.

iOS 7 also introduces a new light content status bar style that is exposed as the Titanium.UI.iPhone.StatusBar.LIGHT_CONTENT constant in the Titanium SDK. Use this constant to specify a status bar for use with a dark background. If you want the entire application to use this style, add the following key to your tiapp.xml file.

The following API elements are obsolete or do not work on iOS 7. These elements are deprecated in Release 3.1.3 and removed in Release 3.2.0 except the setter methods.

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas”

Limiting orientation modes for Appcelerator app

You have a few options for handling device orientation:

• Lock orientation for the whole app
• Lock the orientation for a given window
• React to orientation changes.

Before we begin, it’s important to cover some caveats and subtleties on Android. With that platform, it’s important that you keep in mind that the orientation values you set don’t match those you get. With Android, you can set the UI orientation to any of four possibilities: portrait upright, landscape right, portrait upside-down, and landscape left. But, when you request the current orientation, you’ll get one of two values: portrait or landscape. This is a platform feature, not a Titanium implementation issue.

A further consideration is that portrait and landscape vary between phones and tablets. A phone is in portrait mode when its “top” is at 0 degrees (hardware buttons at the bottom) and landscape when the “top” is at 270 degrees. A tablet is in landscape mode when its top is at 0 and portrait when its top is at 90 degrees. (Based on sensor degrees.) These portrait/landscape values are what you receive when you get the devices current orientation.

ORIENTATION DESIGN PRINCIPLES:

Apple’s Developer documentation says: “People expect to use your app in different orientations, and it’s best when you can fulfill that expectation.” In other words, don’t look at handling orientation as a bother but an opportunity.

Apple further recommends that when choosing to lock or support orientation, you should consider following these principles:

On iPhone/iPod Touch – don’t mix orientation of windows within a single app; so, either lock orientation for the whole app, or react to orientation changes.

On iPhone – don’t support the portrait-upside-down orientation, because that could leave the user with their phone upside-down when receiving a phone call.

On iPad – you should support all orientations because that matches how people use those devices.

These same principles apply to an Android app as well.

ORIENTATION IS AN OPPORTUNITY:

Rather than considering orientation a “necessary evil” to handle, think of it as an opportunity. When a user rotates their device, you could display different content. Consider a recipe app that shows a list of ingredients when in portrait mode but shows cooking directions when the device is in landscape mode. Some handsets mute the speaker when the device is face down. You can probably think of other interesting ways your app could react to an orientation change.

LIMITING ORIENTATION MODES SUPPORTED BY YOUR APP:

You specify the orientations your app can support by modifying the tiapp.xml file. This type of configuration controls the splash screen orientation possibilities. And it constrains which orientations the windows of your apps could possible show in, but not necessarily the orientation of a specific window.

The techniques for iOS and Android vary, so we’ll look at them separately.

LIMITING ORIENTATION MODES ON IOS:

On iOS, you specify the orientations your app supports with values in the tiapp.xml file. By removing an orientation from the list, you prevent the app from displaying in that way. For example, to support only portrait on the iPhone, but support all rotations on the iPad, you’d use this XML in your project’s tiapp.xml file:

CODE:

<iphone>
<orientations device="iphone">
<orientation>Ti.UI.PORTRAIT</orientation>
</orientations>
<orientations device="ipad">
<orientation>Ti.UI.PORTRAIT</orientation>
<orientation>Ti.UI.UPSIDE_PORTRAIT</orientation>
<orientation>Ti.UI.LANDSCAPE_LEFT</orientation>
<orientation>Ti.UI.LANDSCAPE_RIGHT</orientation>
</orientations>
</iphone>

LIMITING ORIENTATION MODES ON ANDROID:

CODE:

<android xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<manifest>
<application>
<activity
android:name="org.appcelerator.titanium.TiActivity"
android:configChanges="keyboardHidden"
android:screenOrientation="portrait"
/>
<activity android:name="ti.modules.titanium.ui.TiTabActivity"
android:configChanges="keyboardHidden"
/>
</application>
</manifest>
</android>

“Try to be like the turtle – at ease in your own shell.”

Appcelerator Cloud Services Impact on Mobile Server-Side Development

The cloud is truly redefining the way we work and play. In it we store our music, our pictures and movies, and our enterprise data. From it we access all of that information from laptops, tablets, smart phones, cars and TVs anywhere anytime. Of course, the mobile revolution is also delivering its fair share of transformation

When we speak with enterprise customers all the time and what we commonly hear goes something like this:

“We have many mobile initiatives and expect to roll out [tens/hundreds/thousands] of apps across multiple platforms over the next few years”

“The apps need to be of high utility and value to our [employees/partners/prospects/customers] and they need to access data from many sources including social networks, public data sources, enterprise data systems like ERP, CRM, SFA, and our custom apps”

“Our competitors have already published something similar, so we need the apps out ASAP”

“But we don’t have the time/money/resources/skills to build all the permutations of mobile client apps as well as the server-side components to support them”

“How can we prioritize one over the other, when we need both. What should we do?”

To answer this question, let me take a slight detour. Remember the good old days of client/server? Life was relatively simple then. We created a database instance with a bunch of tables and fields, hooked it up to a thick client with GUI controls and widgets, and before you knew it, our app was out the door (or more appropriately, on the desk). Network connectivity was not really an issue with LANs and the apps gave us access to the data in an acceptable form factor, on a not-so-portable, big screen, with more than enough room for extras.

But today’s mobile apps are now a complex mash-up of data from many different sources.Today’s apps need to not only look delightful on a multitude of different and smaller-sized screens, but they also need to feel great. They have to support device specific gestures and menus. They have to be cool and engaging. They need to integrate into the user’s life, so they can’t even imagine what it was like before they downloaded it.

In order to do that, an app needs automatic push notifications to update us even when we’re not in the app. We need status updates and feeds from other users so we know what’s happening. We need to “Like” things and share comments so our friends and colleagues know what we’re up to. We want to upload photos so we can share the moments of our lives. Our employees need supply chain data from the SAP system, financial data from the Oracle system and employee data from the HR system, so in that moment of need, in front of a customer or prospect, they can deliver real-time information.

So essentially what we have now are two very different sets of competing requirements – client-side applications and server-side services – both with different success criteria, different development tools and different skill sets.

And therein lies the problem – other than the biggest mega-companies on the planet who don’t have the constraints of money, people, skills, etc, the rest of us are faced with what seems like an impossible predicament.

I would suggest that of the two, the no-brainer winner has to be the client-side app. I don’t think anyone even questions the value of the user experience any more. Look at Apple. They epitomize that maniacal focus in all their products. So too does Google and Amazon.

So that leaves us with the displaced backend server-side. In order to deliver many of the above-mentioned required capabilities, “do-it-yourself” server-side development is perceived as the only solution, where you develop custom software and architectures made up of web, app and database servers to deliver these services and then integrate them to the different client apps. Then you build or provision a new infrastructure to support it all. Then wash, rinse and repeat for every new app and every time one of those data sources changes.

Fortunately there is a way out, and mobile cloud-based services offer a welcome solution. Such backend services provide the core capabilities required, over the cloud, so you can continue to focus on the client-side experience while simply consuming the backend services as needed on the cloud.

At Appcelerator we have Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) which offers a fast, easy, and simple way of building next generation mobile apps. With a proven set of ready-to-consume APIs, you can build beautiful apps in a fraction of the time from any mobile toolkit (of course there are numerous benefits if you use Titanium Studio too). ACS is also extensible, so it can integrate with other public services and private corporate apps to shield you from that complexity on the client.