Author Archives: admin

Parallax in iOS Applications

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layersParallax

The idea of using the phenomenon of parallax in mobile application design is in no way new. Like many other ideas, parallax was borrowed from the Web design realm, where initially it had been rather popular. Parallax enriches your design with an impressive illusion of depth and space. By now, due to certain encumbrances of Web application development, the fashion for parallax in website design has somewhat subsided. The mobile applications world, however, is quite on the contrary. There the parallax is live and kicking and reluctant to retire. Moreover, it has even become a default home screen in the new iOS 7.

In this post, we are going to tell you of our new DVParallaxView component and show you how to enhance your applications with the parallax effect similar or probably even better than the iOS 7 home screen. Continue reading →

The Art of Core Motion in iOS

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Gyroscope2

With emergence of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer on iPhone devices, new opportunities have opened up before iOS application developers. However, although their APIs have been announced for several years now, not much on them can be found on the Web today. On the one hand, this topic is really not so vast to dedicate a book or series of posts to it. But on the other hand, there are certain specifics and pitfalls you have to be aware of. This post is intended for developers who are willing to befriend accelerometer and gyroscope in the iPhone. Continue reading →

Playlist Player for iOS

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DVPlaylistPlayer Title

A player is a core part of your video application. If you ever have tried to build a player into your application, you probably know that you need some time to set up and customize it. We would venture to say, that mostly you need a player to run playlists rather than individual videos. In this post, we would like to tell you about our open source component we use to play back videos in our Together project. Please welcome to our playlist player, DVPlaylistPlayer. Continue reading →

How to Design a Video Platform

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video platform architecture

In this post, we are going to dwell on the process of video platform design for our Together project. From the technical viewpoint, this project is remarkable by containing the entire content lifecycle, from its creation on mobile devices to distribution and viewing. While designing the platform, we sought to attain solution flexibility and cost-efficiency. With the new video platform you can receive, store and share videos. All video management tasks were implemented on Apple HLS. Continue reading →

OSMF HLS Plugin

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http streaming hero

Having been involved in the Together project, I was assigned a task to enable Apple HLS video playback on the Flash platform. Video content delivery in a single format (HLS in this case) is usually very easy and offers many benefits. To process video, Flash has an open source OSMF framework that can be easily enhanced with various plugins. But there is one problem: the framework is absolutely HLS-agnostic. Adobe promoted RTMP first, and only then offered HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) as an alternative to Apple HLS. In this post, we’ll cover a free HLS plugin that we have developed to run HLS in OSMF-enabled video players. Continue reading →

Push Notifications: Tips and Tricks

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push notifications service

Push notifications is a really great mechanism available to all mobile developers (and beyond). With notifications of this type, you can notify users of important events, so that they can respond as quickly as possible, even when the application is not running. Moreover, with this approach you can boost user awareness of your product. In this post, we are going to share our hands-on experience in implementing such functionality in our large-scale projects and provide a number of tips and tricks. Continue reading →

Blur Effect in iOS Applications

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For any iOS application, interface appearance is a key driver to success. Sleek and elaborate design combined with impressive look and feel of your app, can enhance user experience and add points in favor of your application in the App Store.

How can you best impress the user? Nice appearance can be achieved in many ways, one of them is to apply effects on different parts of the interface and the image as a whole. Among all these, perhaps the most commonly used effect is Blur, and we are going to discuss it in this post. We will tell you how to apply Blur using different frameworks, and also we will experiment a little to benchmark performance of different methods. Continue reading →

Pitfalls in Large-Scale Application Development on Node.js

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It has become clear that Node.js has become a striking trend in the community of Web developers. In this post, we are going to discuss, what pitfalls may encroach on the developer in Node.js, and whether it is worth switching to it.

Basically, developers associate Node.js with small services, e.g., chats. (For more details, read "Development of high-performance services for Node.js"). Well, they have a good reason for that. Node.js is a perfect fit for services that support a permanent connection to the client or can wait for a response for a long time. Absence of I/O lock allows you to read large files, keeping your service ready to process new requests. Continue reading →

Best Practices for Server and Application Interaction

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iOS Best Practices

In this modern era of growth and development of mobile applications, enabling of efficient client-server interaction is gaining more importance. In this context, the following factors are critical: flexibility, scalability, documenting, support for older API versions, and caching. In this post, we are going to discuss the most important aspects of service development and design that will help you attain better results. Continue reading →