Windows 8 Tablet OS

There’s a tablet platform coming that will change the way that front, middle and back office conduct their daily activities. The days of traders, collateral optimisers and back office activities where people are tied down to their chairs will soon be a thing of the past. The preferred communication method will no longer be email but more productive and better informed face to face communication. Desktop applications that are chained to people’s workstations will instantly become mobile. Real time data will be on the move and available during meetings and one to one conversations!

What is this new tablet platform? Could it be the IPad3? Despite its 85% market share even the IPad3 doesn’t have what it takes to pull off such a dramatic change in the way we work. Feature predictions such as Siri, better internal storage or SD card slots, retina displays and more cores are great but they aren’t really going to be game changers like the first IPad was in the consumer space. So what platform could pull off such an impact on corporation in an already seemingly saturated market? Believe it or not it’s Windows 8.

It’s not going to be long before people realise that all the WPF UX development activity that has been dominating the banking world over the last few years in the form of dashboards and single dealer platforms will be instantly portable to tablets and natively supported by Windows 8. Recent regulatory changes to reporting requirements in back office environments for example will increase the volume of data being processed for activities such as margin calls and will inevitably require more real-time mobile views of the current state of play.

Inevitably, these new user experiences will be installed on Windows 8 tablets and in most cases where UX has already been a consideration, will require very little change to make them work optimally on tablets as far as user experience is concerned.

Windows 8 offers significant changes towards a tablet user base. Why am I so confident that Windows 8 can accomplish this over any other platform? Well there has recently been a great emphasis from other vendors about their ecosystems. If we’re talking about a corporate developer ecosystem then Microsoft wins every time. As far as corporation goes it’s the developer ecosystem that Microsoft is so good at building that will secure Windows 8 tablets as the dominant tablet platform in the corporate world. The consumer side however is an entirely different story! If Windows 8 is good enough we could see Apple loose consumer tablet market share. My prediction over the next two years is that we will see close to an equal tablet market share split between apple and Microsoft, something like 40/30 respectively with other vendors mopping up the remaining 30%.

Blackberry Playbook Os 2.0 Update

The RIM model for mobile application development is by far the most understated. Supporting such a wide array of languages and runtimes like Java, HTML5, Adobe air and c++ with such great developer support makes Blackberry the smart choice for developing internal mobile software. It’s clear from their developer web sites that RIM have invested a great deal of effort into AppWorld, RIMs mobile app portal. Their most recent pledge to give away 25,000 Blackberry Playbooks to developers is a sign that they aren’t giving up in their battle to re establish themselves as the consumer and business choice for mobile devices. To understand how RIM could possibly recover from the disaster that was the Playbook in 2011 it’s important to highlight the reasons why the device didn’t take off…

The Apple effect

At a time when Apple had such a hold over the tablet market, RIM gave consumers an excuse not to buy the Playbook through a poorly thought out platform release. There were at least three major aspects to this failure.

Cost

The combination of high cost and missing features such as native social networking and email support was a huge mistake. At a cost of over £500 for the original 64gb version, RIM made it impossible for consumers to justify parting with that kind of money when rivals such as the iPad were similarly priced. Blackberry had gambled on their loyal business clients lapping up the devices but failed to understand the benefits of owning a tablet in the first place. To be fair to RIM there were many security considerations that had to be considered to avoid alienating their enterprise users. No doubt it was a tough call.

Form factor

At the time of its release there was much disappointment with the 7 inch profile of the Playbook which, although more portable, seamed to offer nothing else in exchange for the compromise of a smaller form factor.

Apps and features

What apps? RIM went with their own proprietary App World as the distribution platform and they soon found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having no user base and therefore no developers willing to write nice shiny new apps for them! Moreover there was no native email client or contacts or calendar for that matter. In fact the only thing you could realistically do with your playbook was surf the web. Whilst I think that the Playbook development model is by far the best option for corporate tablet software, its not enough when there is so much else missing that is critical to corporate staff, such as err communication!

So what’s changed?

In a dramatic u-turn, RIM have addressed all the issues that were holding back the Playbook. The cost has halved! With the 64GB version now just £249 and their16GB version even cheaper at £169, it now represents incredible value for money. To top if off RIM’s Playbook OS 2.0 update now includes all the missing features, including the eagerly awaited and fully integrated native email client with contact, calendar and communication aggregation.

Apps

RIM has now incorporated the android runtime into the OS so users will be able to run android applications on their Playbook. This instantly raises the consumer appeal of the Playbook. On the corporate and banking side, the Blackberry mobile fusion update will allow organisations to manage Blackberry, Android and Ios devices from the same unified interface. There’s also the Blackberry Balance technology which allows enterprise to control the use of personal and corporate smart phones and apps within the corporate network. This demonstrates a commitment to enterprise which no other vendor can match.

Additionally the enhanced Blackberry Bridge features allows users to control their Playbooks from their Blackberry smart phones, very useful for presentations and communication. When you couple this with the original benefits of the Playbook over Ios such as unparalleled security features, true multi-tasking, the superior QNX user experience, full support for open web standards such as HTML5 and also native support for Adobe flash, the Playbook is now by far the superior tablet available on the market today which will enable it to compete with IPad, Android and the imminent Windows 8 tablet devices.

Despite the rumours that a ten inch version of the Playbook is just around the corner I believe the existing form factor sets the play book apart form the competition giving users a rich platform in a more portable device.

So what’s next?

RIM’s work has only just begun. They now need to convince consumers to reconsider the Playbook since Apple has proved that the consumer is the best route to corporate uptake. However there will now be instant appeal for the Playbook in the corporate space. With superior security and recently added communication features coupled with the much more reasonable price tag, RIM can now look forward to significant increases in sales of their Playbook tablet devices.

Halliburton’s decision to supply its 4,500 employees with iPhones instead of Blackberry’s represents another hammer blow to RIM. Following last years’ well publicised global blackout, RIM has had to work hard at convincing enterprise that the Blackberry is still the mobile communication device of choice.
What should concern RIM is the migration towards iPhone amongst financial services organisations pre-blackout, when Credit Suisse allowed Apple and Android products on its internal networks. One third of its 25,000 employees now use personal smartphones for work. Following this, Barclays Capital and Standard Chartered have also embraced Blackberry alternatives in the office.

Most corporate professionals carry two phones, their Blackberry and their smartphone, representing both business and consumer markets. Consumers buy in to Apple because, quite frankly, Apple produces beautiful hardware and deliver the perfect consumer experience. By comparison, Blackberry’s appeal to the business world is its security, email and messaging capabilities.

The problem for RIM is the draconian nature of the recent service outage, which has raised alarm bells and highlighted some of the devices more fundamental shortcomings such as performance and usability. Many people, like the iPhone because of its slicker interface and its broader selection of mobile applications. In addition, Google’s innovations are piling on the pressure by delivering equally excellent, if not better, software for mobile devices, giving smartphone users really good alternatives to IOS.

RIM has long had to compete against Apple and Google technology in terms of usability but now, after the blackout debacle, is losing out in the reliability stakes too. Thus, if the concerns of corporate institutions – security and performance – can be addressed by the more user-friendly and intuitive phones on the market, then the device that revolutionised remote working could be in danger of becoming irrelevant.

With existing transistor processor technology reaching its physical limits, cooling technology is getting more sophisticated. Companies such as Hardcore Computer already supply submersion cooled desktops that enable the CPU to be overclocked further than with air cooling or liquid cooling technology.

What is submersion cooling?

Traditional water cooling involves keeping water well away from electrical components because as we all know: water + electronic components := short circuit! But there are liquid substances that do not conduct electricity known as dielectric (not electrically conductive) substances. Vegetable oil is an example of a dielectric but Mineral oil is preferred due to its odourless, colourless and safe properties. With submersion cooling, all of the PC components are submersed in a dielectric substance, other than optical and HDD drives, maximising the heat transfer rate from all components. Dielectrics can be 1300 times more efficient at displacing heat than traditional cooling systems. A secondary benefit of submersion cooling is that there is no cooling fan noise, as a result submersion cooled systems run almost silently.

How does submersion cooling benefit HFT systems?

HFT is all about squeezing every millisecond of performance out of all the technology involved, be it physical networking through locating hardware geographically close to the financial exchange. Or in this case getting the most out of the CPU and GPU through overclocking. Overclocking means that the processor has to work harder which generates higher temperatures. The lower you can keep temperatures, the higher you can overclock the processor, and that’s where submersion cooling comes in.

Click here for an interview with one of the founders of Hardcore Computer.

This article gives an insight into the types of skills that are involved in a world where every cutting edge concept within computing is being applied to a very fast moving and specialist area. Fascinating…

You can read the full article here

Also check out this article on the topic.

Sometimes its useful to extract the variables from a persisted workflow to debug an issue or to verify your persistence for various reasons. Workflows are persisted in binary xml format by default, so it’s possible to extract the data into an xml file. Creating a project in visual studio to do this is somewhat tedious so I created a PowerShell script to help me out a little.

The script uses Ado.Net to connect to the workflow persistence store, which in my case is a Sql Server database. It reads the relevant table and then exports the data to a file which is given the name of the workflow instance id.

I am assuming you have used PowerShell before. If not then check out PowerGUI to get you started. If you have not installed PowerShell yet you will need to do two things to run this script in PowerShell…

Firstly you will need to run the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet so that you can run scripts. I use RemoteSigned which ensures that any scripts downloaded onto my machine need to be signed before they can run. This will allow you to run scripts created on your machine freely.

Secondly I am using .Net 4.0 classes in my script so I need to make sure that PowerShell is running in the 4.0 runtime or above.

To check which version you have running; type “[System.Environment]::Version” into your PowerShell console. If the version is less than 4.0 then you will need to add the following registry key to your registry:

32-bit apps on a 32-bit operating system
64-bit apps on a 64-bit operating system
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework]
“OnlyUseLatestCLR”=dword:00000001

32-bit apps on a 64-bit operating system
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework]
“OnlyUseLatestCLR”=dword:00000001

So now you can paste the following script into your PowerShell script file replacing the connection string value and the query with your required settings. In my case I am extracting data from the ReadWriteComplexDataProperties column so you may also want to change this.

$connectionstring = "Data Source=localhost\SQLExpress;Initial Catalog=SQLPersistenceStore;Integrated Security=True;"
$connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection $connectionstring
$command = $connection.CreateCommand()
$command.CommandText = "select * from [system.activities.durableinstancing].instances"
$connection.Open()
$reader = $command.ExecuteReader()

trap [Exception]
{
$connection.Close()
}

I think the script is fairly self-explanatory. The only thing I think worth mentioning here is the trap exception block at the end which will ensure that the connection is closed in the event of any error.

You can download the script and registry file from here

The cool thing about developing on the Air platform is that the end result should be device independent. So if I am developing an application for an Android tablet I can probably get away with testing the app on any tablet OS that supports the Air runtime. At least in the development stages anyway. Of course most of the time you will be able to get away with using the ADL desktop player but testing on a device simulator is necessary to test gestures work as you would expect for your application. So we know the Android Emulators are slow. To be honest they are so slow I think they are the wrong tool for doing intermediate development testing. I now use the android emulators when I want to test the application actually works on specific devices before I submit to the marketplace. Of course you should always test on the actual hardware if you can. So what can we use in the development stages?

Use the Playbook simulator

Of course if you are using Flex Builder then this may seem a little more obvious. However with Flash Develop the device support is not so integrated.

RIM have a great Playbook simulator which works a treat. Simply download the Playbook SDK and simulator package, install it and use the following command line to package to the simulator substituting the arguments with your project specific values.

blackberry-airpackager -package bin\MyFlexProject.bar
-C bin -installApp -launchApp application.xml
bin\MyFlexProject.swf -device 192.168.189.128

You will need to start up the simulator virtual machine before you run this command and swap the IP address with the IP of the virtual device.

You can find more information on the command line deployment process on the RIM website

You can download the sample Flash Builder project containing the DeployToPlaybook.bat file that I have created from here.

Following on from my last post about getting up and running with Flex. Here is how to quickly get an end to end Android dev environment up and running with Flash Develop.

You can download the complete Flash Develop project from here. But you will need to update the SDK paths.

Step 1 : Install Flash develop and the latest Android and Flex 4.5 SDKs

Install Android SDK

Download Abobe flex 4.5

Download and install Flash Develop

Step 2 : Create a new Flash Develop Project

Create a new Air Flex 4 Projector project and give it a name e.g. “MyFlexProject”

Step 3 : Enable the project for Flex 4.5 compilation

In FlashDevelop go to Project -> Properties and under the “Output” tab you will need to create a custom command to test your movie as follows : $(FlexSDK)\bin\adl.exe;application.xml bin. Replace $(FlexSDK) with the path to the flex 4.5 SDK that you downloaded.

Under the “Compiler options” tab set the “Custom path to flex sdk” property to your flex SDK bin directory that you downloaded earlier.

Add the following additional command line arguments:
-swf-version=11
-target-player=10.2

Step 4 : Create the application.xml file

Now we need to replace the application.xml with the latest supported version from the SDK. I always start with the Applicaiton.xml content that comes with the SDK to pick up any changes. In your flex 4.5 SDK directory under “Templates\Air” copy the contents of the descriptor-template.xml and paste into your application.xml file.

Step 5 : Setup the package and deployment .xml files

Open the PackageApplication.xml and change the adt call to :

call adt -package -target apk-emulator %SIGNING_OPTIONS% %AIR_FILE% %APP_XML% %FILE_OR_DIR%

Change the signing options by removing the TSA option:

set SIGNING_OPTIONS=-storetype pkcs12 -keystore %CERTIFICATE%

Change the AIR_FILE variable to point to an apk file instead of a .air file e.g.

set AIR_FILE=air/YourProjectName.apk

You will also need to update all the references to “$(FlexSDK)” to the path of your flex SDK. The same will need to be done for the CreateCertificate.bat file.

Step 6 : Create an android deployment bat file

Just to make things a little easier, create a deployment bat file with a call to…

call adb install -r air\MyFlexProject.apk

Step 7 : Test your project

Build the project to test the new settings. If everything has been setup correctly your project should build successfully.

Step 8 : package for android

Now let’s package the application for installation on an Android device.

Run your CreateCertificate.bat file and then run the PackageApplication.bat file. For the package to work you will need to ensure you have valid values set in the applicaiton.xml file. If all goes well you should find a .apk file in the air sub directory of your project working folder.

Step 9 : Deploy to the android emulator

Run the Android SDK and AVD Manager which you will find in your start menu once you have installed the Android SDK.

Create an Android Device which must be running Android 2.2 and above to be able to run the Flex 4.5 Air runtime. Start up the Device.

Step 10 : Test your application on the device

Just to make sure the environment is running smoothly; go back to Flash develop and open the main.mxml file and add a panel with a simple label control. You will need to change the Root “WindowedApplication” tag to a “Application” tag. WindowedApplication is not supported by Android.

Now Build the project and run it. You should See your Panel and Label in the Air debug launcher.

Now Install your application onto the device using the PackageApplciation.bat file and then run the DeployToAndroid.bat file that you created earlier.

You should now see your application appear in the Apps on the emulator

After running the application it should look as it did when you ran it in debug mode.

Enjoy!

It’s amazing how a simple effect can transform an application. I have tried to find ways to create a simple glass effect as quickly as possible and with as few brushes and layers as possible to aid in render performance, particularly for Windows mobile 7. My previous attempts looked more like a pipe than glass and involved too many brushes. I have managed to get mine down to two brushes. I think i could get it down further and just use colour substitution but that’s for another post! So here is how I am currently doing it…

Step 1 – Create the first rectangle

Start with a blank user control and ensure you have a layout root grid. This will be very important for the scaling later on.

Create a new rectangle in your required dimensions, in my case its 150 x 50 pixels. Set the fill to a gradient fill maintaining the default gradient. Set the first colour to Black and the second colour to a dark grey, i have used #FF454444 as the dark grey. Set the corner radius to 3 for both x and y.

Step 2 – Create the glass effect rectangle.

The next step is to create the inner rectangle which will give us the glass effect. To do this simply copy the previous rectangle and paste. For now we just want to shrink it so we can get the look right and feel right. Shrink the inner rectangle so that it’s just under half the height of the first rectangle and so that there is a nice gap on either side. Change the gradient colours to white and set the Alpha of the first colour to 10 and the second to 75.

Step 3 – Make the button

Now it’s time to make a Button out of the rectangles we have. First we need to group everything into a Grid. So right click and select “Group Into” and select “Grid” or Ctrl + G.

Now select “Tools” -> “Make into control” and select the button control. Give the template a name.

You should now see the button text appear in the centre of the control. This will also put you in template edit mode. You will need to either double click on the canvas or click the ‘Button’ element at the top of the designer. This is so that You can set the font size and colour of the button to the desired settings. I have set them to 23 and White.

Step 4 – Make the button scalable

You should now have something that looks like a button however if you try to scale it the elements won’t stay in proportion to the height and width of the actual button.

The Easiest way to get around this is to place the elements into a layout element that scales its content. I find the Grid makes the most sense so enter template edit mode by right clicking the control and selecting “Edit Template” -> “Edit Current”.

Select the Grid you grouped the elements into earlier from the “Objects and Timeline” toolbar and add to it three columns and three rows. You can do this from the layout tool bar.

Set the column with to 0.025,1 and 0.025 star respectively and the row heights to 0.15, 0.75 and 1 star respectively. This is very important as it is what will retain the relevant proportions of the elements.

Place the background rectangle and the content presenter in row and column 0 with row span and column span set to 3. Place the glassy rectangle in row 1 column 1 and now set the glassy margins to 0 and its height and width to Auto with horizontal and vertical alignment set to stretch.

Make sure that the Content element is a layer behind the glassy rectangle by moving it in the Objects and Timeline toolbar. This is so that the whole button will appear to be glass including the text. You can test this is the case by changing the foreground of the button to a shade that will make this clear to see.

That’s it. You should now have a very simple scalable glass button.