Foundation of Android Programming - 5-6 March 2014

Come and join us on the 5-6 March 2014 where you will be able to learn how to get started in writing your first Android 4.4 applications. You will learn how to create interesting Android apps that:
* Connect to Web services
* Launch other apps
* Obtain user's location 
* Display Google Maps
* Send and receive SMS messages
* Save data to files and databases
* and more!

Venue
Bayview Hotel Singapore
30 Bencoolen Street
Singapore 189621

Fee
S$997 (nett; no GST)

Download course brochure and application form here. 

Pebble course on 10-11 March 2014

For the Pebble course, on the 10-11 March 2014, you are recommended to bring along a Mac if you have one. If you don't have a Mac, you can bring along a Windows machine loaded with VirtualBox. This is because the SDK for the Pebble is Unix-based, and hence a native version of the SDK is not available for the Windows platform. As such, if you have a Windows machine, you will use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu (a version which I have prepared) and run the SDK on Ubuntu.

As for mobile device, you are required to bring along a mobile device (iOS devices strongly recommended). If you don't have an iOS device, you can also bring along your Android device. The reason for this is that the Pebble mobile app is currently in beta for Android, and it still has some minor issues in terms of stability. The Pebble mobile app for iOS, on the other hand, is already in the AppStore and is much more stable and reliable than its Android counterpart.

Hope to see you all at the Pebble course!

Slides for my presentation on Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacons programming in Riga, Latvia - 12 Feb 2014

I presented a session on Bluetooth Low Energy and iBeacons programming in Riga, Latvia on the 12 Feb 2014. If you did not make it for the event, here is the slide deck that I used for my presentation.

Article - Using Background Fetch in iOS

I am super excited to see my latest article published on MobiForge. Here is the abstract:

"In iOS, except for some special cases, an application is not allowed to run in the background. While certainly a serious restriction for some types of application, this feature is designed to conserve battery power. Imagine apps continuing to run in the background without reins, and it is easy to see how the entire system might slow down and deplete the battery within a few hours.

Apple takes a measured approach to background processing. In the early days of the iPhone, after complains from developers about the inability to run apps in the background, Apple introduced the Apple Push Notification service (APNS). APNs allows apps which are not already running to receive background push notifications, thereby allowing apps to be notified when some important events need their attention.

In iOS 7, Apple has introduced another feature to allow apps to run (more or less) in the background – Background Fetch. Background Fetch allows your app to continuously fetch data from the network when it is in the background. As an example, consider the Facebook app. When the Facebook app is in the background, it can continually fetch the latest news feed so that when the user switches the app to the foreground, the latest news feed is already ready for viewing.

In this article we'll take a look to see how background fetch can be used to connect to a Web service, the Open Weather Map API, so that your app can continue to update itself in the background."