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October 1, 2009

Going with the Flow: Tips and Tricks for Using the Adobe Flex TextFlow Component

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We’ve been busily developing using Flex 4 (aka “Gumbo”) here at the Grio offices and are impressed with many of its new features. One of the more interesting but difficult to decipher features is the TextFlow component.

The TextFlow component is used to layout text in a highly controlled way. It uses an XML-based markup language, Text Layout Format (TLF), to define the content of the TextFlow. TLF uses some similar tags to HTML (<div>, <p>, <span>), but it is definitely not HTML.  This may trip you up a bit as you learn TLF; I recommend reading the Adobe Labs info before diving too deep into development (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/).

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October 1, 2009

Vook is Live Today

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Grio developed the vook platform and Flex-based reader. Look for new vooks to come out on a regular basis.

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September 21, 2009

Grio Completes Flex App for Compiere, Inc.

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Grio has recently completed a custom Adobe Flex application for Compiere, Inc. Compiere delivers the most widely used open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solution with more than 1.8 million software downloads.

Grio was employed by Compiere to help create a new Flex-based module that will be delivered in Compiere's upcoming release.

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June 12, 2009

Grio Inks a Vook Deal

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Grio has been selected by Vook to develop an end-to-end technology that bring the worlds of video and books together on the Internet, through multiple applications, devices and platforms.

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May 25, 2009

Feel My Pain: NSXMLParser Problems Upgrading to the iPhone 3.0 SDK

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I set out a couple of weeks ago to port the Killer Deals
application from the iPhone 2.2.1 SDK to 3.0. “No problem”, I thought; the
application doesn’t veer far from the standard APIs and controls, and it is a
relatively straightforward application, implementation-wise.

As I was making my updates (some minor method and property
name changes here and there), I stumbled upon a show stopper: The NSXMLParser
was no longer parsing my XML data. After scratching my head for a few hours, I
finally figured out the problem.

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May 12, 2009

Scrum is like 20th Century Politics (Part 2 of 3)

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Part 1

Having toiled for years under the yoke of a brutal waterfallocracy, one bitter developer learns of management’s decision to adopt scrum and sees…a revolution.

Born is the Marxist, leader and friend to the common bit farmer.

The revolutionary swoons at scrum’s commitment to the “self-organizing team”. He visualizes an enervated bourgeois middle management, an empowered development base that directs company affairs, and an opportunity to play video games at work.

read on

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April 27, 2009

Think Services Turns to Grio to Enhance its Flagship Products

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Grio proudly announced the signing of its consulting agreement with Think Services, a division of United Business Media. As part of this collaboration, Grio will assist by designing and introducing an agile software development methodology that fits Think Services' needs. In addition, Grio will be a key player in helping to build the company's next generation of products.

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April 26, 2009

Dealing with JSON on iPhone

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You can easily use the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data format in client-server communications when writing an iPhone app. This blog is not suggesting that JSON is a more superior format for data exchange than its counterparts such as XML. In fact, we have many projects that don’t use JSON. However, handling JSON is relatively straight forward in ObjectiveC.

Unfortunately, Apple iPhone SDK (as of this writing, the latest is iPhone 2.2.1) doesn’t come with a built-in JSON parser. But I found out a good one called json-framework. It is both a generator and a parser. As a generator, json-framework can create JSON data from an NSDictionary. As a parser, you can pass to json-framework an NSString that consists of JSON data and it will return a NSDictionary that encapsulates the parsed data.

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April 18, 2009

Broadcasting Information: How to use the iPhone Notification Center

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There are times when building an iPhone application that you
need to inform other parts of the program to do something, without regard to
what or where those parts are. The NSNotificationCenter (aka “notification
center”) is the way to go in these cases. Using notifications supports ‘loose
coupling’, which is a good thing in software design.

A notification center object provides a mechanism for
broadcasting information (“notifications”) within a task. An
NSNotificationCenter object is basically a notification dispatch table. For
those familiar with Windows programming, this pattern is similar to the Windows
Message Loop architecture.

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April 12, 2009

Scrum is like 20th Century Politics (Part 1 of 3)

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Scrum is a bit like 20th century politics. You have your burn-down crazed fascists, your ground-up “power to the coding plebe” reds, greedy ladder climbers hiding under the guise of scrumocracy, and on very rare occasions… responsible elected representation.

Fascism

Let’s deal with the fascists first. Your average scrum doctrinaire falls back on phrases like “command and control” to describe the tired, archaic waterfallists. They should poke their own chests with that finger. I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that a large percentage of businesses practicing scrum err on the side of a Gestapo-like control. Why? Well let me answer you with a question: What do you think got your Product Owner or Director of Engineering their job in the first place?

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