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Stuff like this is a great start, but until these OS modification can be installed on any phone without rooting or pissing off your service provider I don’t see it getting much traction. It’s probably different in Europe where service providers are in a much different position, but here in the states Verizon won’t ever support that kind of thing across the board. Possibly on a few handsets they can get it backed in from the OEM, but not as something a user is installing on their own. This means that BYOD isn’t possible here and the enterprise will have to provide the phone. This puts us back to where we were a few years ago with Blackberry.

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Niklas Heidloff recently blogged about how to use the new SVN support in Notes 8.5.3. However, something really stood out right at the begining:

There are three “repositories” that need to be kept in synch:
1) The server side managed SVN project 
2) The client side on disk project under SVN control 
3) The NSF project (using a virtual file system) 

I have to remember to keep 3 different copies of my NSF in sync?!?! (I’m not going to even mention the DXL aspects of this whole thing either) Don’t get me wrong, It’s great that IBM is finally getting around to doing this after 20 years, but it seems really complicated to me. Of course, there is a much easier way. A way that has been around for 10+ years. A way that doesn’t require any thing else complicated to manage like a subversion repository. Teamstudio CIAO!

Using Teamstudio CIAO! for XPages development

So how easy is it to add a database to source control using CIAO!? Once CIAO is installed, it takes only 3 steps.

Step 1. Open your database in Domino designer and click the CIAO icon in the toolbar.

Click yes

Step 2. Enter in the project information. Only the path to the CIAO! Log is required.

Step 3. Enter in a comment for the initial version of this database.

Relax a bit….

Done. That’s it! You can now check out and check in from the CIAO! dialog or if you are using Domino Designer 8.5.1 or higher you can check things out right from the application navigator in Designer!

Also, just like with the Subversion support in 8.5.3, you you can see what elements are checked out by other people on your team.

Finally here is a video that walks through the entire process. Don’t worry though, it only takes 1 minute and 13 seconds from start to finish…. Don’t try that with Subversion!

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#2 really hit home today. ‘GET THY DATA DIALED!’. Getting your data right is more important than you think in a web app.

In my dataProxy agent I needed an easy way to get all the URL parameters. I figured I would post that in a separate entry so it wouldn’t get lost.

	private HashMap getURLParameters() throws NotesException {
        String url = agentContext.getDocumentContext().getItemValueString("QUERY_STRING");

        String[] vals = url.split("&");
        HashMap m = new HashMap();
        for( int i = 0; i < vals.length; i++){
        	String[] p = vals[i].split("=");
        	if( p.length == 2 ){
	        	try {
					m.put(p[0], URLDecoder.decode(p[1],"UTF-8") );
				} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
					// TODO Auto-generated catch block
					e.printStackTrace();
				}
        	}        	
        }
		return m;
	}

I can then save them in a member of my agent as a HashMap like param.get(“db”) or param.containsKey(“db”) and can get at them where ever I am.

HTML5, CSS3, etc…. It doesn’t matter what the standard says, until the browsers all support it the same, you don’t get cross platform without pain or for free.

This is a great little tutorial on using media queries to control the layout of the content in your web app. This can be very handy when you are trying to display content to a variety of mobile devices - phones, tablets, laptops - and don’t want to develop different sites for each - but remember - don’t make your mobile users download more than they need!