News & Views

  • Industrial User Experience Trends To Watch in 2016

    December 07, 2015

    "What's Trending?" is a common question I often get asked as the world of User Experience, specifically in the Industrial space, rapidly spreads. There’s no better time than now to offer some insight into what we, as digital experience and UX experts, see trending as 2015 comes to a close and we look beyond to 2016. Industrial User Experience innovation is maturing every day. The organizations that embrace this innovation, will most certainly see great returns on their investments. 

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  • A Culture That Fits

    September 26, 2015

    A challenge that every software company faces is striking the balance between staying relevant and staying productive. Software is aggressively evolving; it seems that every day there is a new tool, framework, API, or version of software trending on Y-News, and staying apprised of these evolutions is essential to success. If you fall behind, you run the risk of losing business to a more advanced competitor. In addition, without constant vigilance you may well expose your users to security vulnerabilities. Both outcomes are inevitable, and it is a company’s responsibility to adapt.

     

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  • iOS 9 Adoption: Looking Good!

    September 24, 2015

    After two weeks, iOS 9 adoption appears to be chugging along significantly faster than iOS 8 adoption. First, I'll show you with some pretty, pretty graphs how much faster iOS 9 is being adopted than iOS 8. Next, I'll talk about some of the reasons why that's been the case. Finally, I'll discuss what that means for developers and app owners.

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  • Reactive Forms with RxAndroid

    August 28, 2015

    Reactive Programming has been getting a lot of attention in the Android community lately. While it has uses throughout the application stack, we're going to focus here on using it to validate forms (exciting!). This approach cuts down on ugly nested if statements and transforms all of the validation logic to just a few simple lines using the RxJava framework. More, it's robust and testable.

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  • Help Get Customers The Most Bang For Their iPad Buck With iOS 9 Multitasking

    August 22, 2015

    Since the first hardware was rolled 2010, the knock on the iPad has always been that it’s simply an oversized iPhone. While there have been some options which Apple has provided to help developers take advantage of the additional screen real estate like UISplitView, the iPad has lacked the ability to let users take full advantage of that real estate directly...until now. With the announcement of iOS 9, Apple added three new, iPad-only features that are designed to take advantage of the additional space, memory, and horsepower in a device that’s the size of an iPad instead of an iPhone: Picture in Picture, Slide Over, and Split View.

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  • The New Vokal.io

    August 12, 2015

    You probably didn’t notice that we migrated our whole website from Drupal to Keystone.JS, but we did, and it was a great experience.

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  • Why Software Fixes Can Create New Bugs and How We Deal With Them

    July 03, 2015

    Bugs exist in many different forms, even outside of software. Consider a structural engineer tasked with building a bridge. Calculations need to be made early on, before construction of the bridge begins, to determine what the weight limits of the bridge will be and to ensure it will not become a victim to aeroelastic flutter. Failure to identify these issues early on can (and will) result in a “buggy” bridge that is prone to collapse. A structural engineer building a bridge will begin with blueprints that allow him/her to assess any potential problems early on. It’s obviously much easier to tweak a drawing than a bridge that is already built.

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  • Two Approaches to Building Apps on Multiple Platforms: A Developer's Perspective

    July 01, 2015

    Here are several important things to consider before building a product across multiple platforms.

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  • Legacy Code: 7 tips for approaching code you didn’t write

    June 19, 2015

    I was recently presented the opportunity to jump on a project that has been running for 6 years and is easily a thousand files strong. Much of my past engineering experience has been centered on smaller projects that I either created or had direct access to the person who did. Thus, I was a fish out of water inheriting a project of this magnitude. I am writing this post to pass down some words of advice so that your transition will be both productive and as painless as possible.

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  • Simplifying Automatic Code Generation with XcodeAutoBasher

    May 27, 2015

    Software developers can benefit a lot from automatic code generation tools. They take tedious, repetitive processes out of the workflow, and help eliminate potential mistakes caused by sloppy development (or in the case of iOS, poor spelling in stringly-typed code).

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