Tag: mobile app development

The chipmaker made a powerful call to app development companies to underscore its intentions in the market.

Recently in Boston, at the AnDevCon, Intel reached out to Android developers, placing a greater focus on its own determination to expand the role that it currently plays within the mobile technology marketplace.

During the keynote speech from Jeff McVeigh, the company admitted mistakes in its early mobile strategy.

Jeff McVeigh, the developer products division at Intel’s general manager of performance, client, and visual computing, gave a keynote address in which he acknowledged that Intel had not taken the ideal path when it came to the creation of its initial mobile technology strategy. This included his own assumption that the majority of Android development would go on within the Dalvik virtual machine. The Dalvik is essentially an intermediary layer occurring between the Android system and applications, which converts apps into Dalvik executables, which are a format that mobile and other less powerful computing devices can run more easily.

The Android Native development kit’s mobile technology has since been used for many of the best performing apps.

This, despite the fact that Dalvik is still the Android development vehicle of choice. That said, when using the Android Native development kit (NDK), the intermediary is eliminated, making it quite appealing to developers.

McVeigh explained that “If you look at the top 2,000 apps on the Google Play Store today, only one-third of them are using Dalvik only.” He also pointed out that “The other two-thirds have some level of NDK; some level of optimized code that’s been polished to a specific architecture.”

Furthermore, he also pointed out that even though Android has quickly overtaken all of the other mobile operating systems and has established itself in a considerable lead of that market around the world, developers could still do themselves a disservice if they don’t make certain that they are accessible to those using other platforms, such as iOS and Windows Phone.

He explained that in order to truly reach the broadest base over mobile technology, Android cannot be the exclusive focus. “I need to be looking across platforms, across operating systems, and developing my applications to span that experience.”

This SDK will soon be in the hands of many developers for the creation of applications for users.

SAP has now announced the general availability of its latest mobile app development tools in its Mobile Platform 3.0, which is a software development kit (SDK) that has been designed to allow developers to be able to build applications for business partners, employees, and consumers.

Among the early adopters of this newly shipped software is National Grid, a U.K electricity and gas transmission network.

That company has already used this mobile app development platform update in combination with other tools from SAP in order to provide more than 1,500 field engineers with greater ability for using iOS devices to maintain the energy grid. Those engineers are employing the new system for a broad spectrum of different tasks that include everything from maintenance work that has been completed in the field, to taking photos of the repair work that needs to be done or that has been completed. As soon as the mobile devices connect with a WiFi network, the images that have been captured are stored for transmission alongside the rest of the history for that job, and any additional useful data.

This use of the mobile app development platform will mean a considerable savings on data plan use costs.

According to the UK National Grid’s head of Information Systems, Tina Sands, this new mobile device friendly software from SAP “delivers an incredibly powerful but simple user experience for our field engineers so they can focus on their day jobs.”

Also using a pre-release version of the SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 is Augsburg, Germany-based MSC Mobile. That company’s mobile developers created an application that brings in the power of augmented reality. The concept is that it will allow workers in stores to be able to check whether or not the products that bring in the highest profits remain in stock on the store shelves, or whether they need to be restocked (or reordered, for that matter).

The mobile app development of that MSC Mobile product, which is called Shelf Plus, also provides employees with the ability to view a store shelf through the device screen in order to identify the location of certain items that are on a pre-created checklist.