Technoholix - the tech appetite

As the name suggests, Smartphones have something better than the regular phones and that accounts for its smartness. So, what does this smartness mean? It is something that helps you to use the device for purposes that are better than just phone call and SMS

1. It’s all about Data: -In this information era, people  like to keep in sync/updated with information he/she really intends to, and mostly with  better precision. That information is not only voice centric, but also tends to be largely data centric. i. e. – email, social networks, blogs, and all .com services . The mobile allows user to surf any page on the web. And needless to say that following capabilities make this exprience richer than a regular mobile phone :

           a. Larger Screen Size 

           b. QWERTY key pad

           c. Wireless Data Transfer technologies 3G/4G

2. Utilities: There are bunch of utilities in Smartphone which make it superphone. These utilities are bind with device and and are the ones that user needs on the go.The usability ratio of these devices on the go will always be higher than laptops and computers for these features. Some of the worth mentioning utilities are,  GPS, Compass, accelerometer, gyroscope, camera (now days cameras are  capable of  capturing high quality video as well).
There could be hundreds of application built around above utilities which can make life easier.Layar on iphone and Android phones is a classic example which combiles, Cameras , Maps and GIS with Augmented Reality as one big information system. 

3.Hardware capabilities:To write an app in such a way that, utilities the utilities mentioned in above point, needs lot of processing power and good amount to memory to run an app and  make it usable. Fortunately current smartphone’s are capable with latest high performance ARM processors and GB’s of memory and which is increasing according to moors law.

These capabilities boost the usability of mobile devices by putting smartness on them. Few other factors  make it popular like, innovative echo system, changes in technology trends, changes in users needs etc.. and incorporation of all these concepts on phone at an amazing pace.

Ruby based CSS ! Now thats something interesting, I will try it out and put a write up

milandobrota:

It is possible with supercool gem LESS www.lesscss.org/

Now a days smart phones are a big buzz and every one every where keeps talking about it. It seems like people are rushing to port their ideas or web solutions onto smart-phones. As per the current situation there are two ways to port a solution: either by writing a web app or by creating a native app for the mobile platform. These are the two theoretical approaches. The ground reality is, in past couple of years, there have been almost a quarter of a million apps in the aggregated app stores. As compared to web apps, it is a substantially huge number, which means, there is an increasing trend towards the smart phone native app development as compared to mobile web app development.

The probable reasons for native applications being more popular can be as below,
- native apps have better user experience.
- native apps have key access to native controls like GPS, Accelorometer, Camera, Phonebook etc…
- writing a native app is quick money maker and easy to reach to the end users as compared to the web apps.
- Easy to overcome display size limitation of mobile devices, as they have better UI controls.

This trend seems promising, but question is , will the same trend remain equally hot in the future?, will the apps keep flooding the different stores at the same pace ?

According to me, web app would take the lead in the near future because of following reasons :
1. Web app is always easy to port for multiple devices. It is platform independent and all it requires to run is a browser.
2. HTML5 and CSS3 have made life easier for the programmers to write functionality which are widely accepted.
3. In the future era of cloud computing there is limited role for the device.
4. Many API access are available on server like, GPS Access, Camera Access etc for the Android device.
5. Web app is easy to handle and control.
6. Web app is easy to distribute.
7. One final reason is currently webs rule the world, i don’t see any particular reason for native mobile application market to grow after a this point, except any market propaganda.

Capistrano is a deployment tool for Ruby based applications. We need to take care that we create a set of ssh keys, add that to our local system, repository and the server where the code needs to be deployed. The Capistrano recipe in our deploy.rb looks something like below.

#helps to read the public key from the repository     
default_run_options[:pty] = true
set :use_sudo, true 

#Application Settings 
set :synchronous_connect, true 
set :application, “methell” 

#Source Repository Settings 
set :scm, :git
set :branch, “master” 
set :repository, “git@safewlabs.unfuddle.com:safewlabs/methell.git” 

#Server Options 
set :deploy_to, “/var/www/#{application}” 
set :domain, “www.methell.com” 
set :deploy_via, :copy 
set :copy_exclude, [".git"] 
set :ssh_options, { :forward_agent => true } 
set :user, “root” 
set :use_sudo, “true” 
role :app, domain
role :web, domain
role :db, domain,:primary = true

#Phusion Passenger Restart Options 
namespace :passenger do 
   desc “Restart Application” 
     task :restart do
         run “touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt” 
     end 
 end 
 namespace :deploy do
     task :restart,:roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do     passenger.restart 
     end 
end