Programming Articles

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SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Beware of Improper Property Usage

Property abuse in C# is a pet peeve of mine. Properties are meant to represent data, and methods are meant to represent actions. When properties are used improperly, you create a breeding ground for misunderstandings and bugs. Take a look at MSDN’s guidelines on when to use a method instead of a property. See any […]
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POP for Prototyping

Do you POP?  Maybe you should.  It’s a free prototyping app, currently available for iPhone but soon to be released for Android. POP is a super simple way to capture your wonderful pencil scratchings electronically and create a semi-functional wireframe that you can share with others. POP uses the camera on your phone (or existing […]
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Why HTML-based Smartphone Apps are a Bad Idea

I’ve long had this opinion that building smartphone apps by writing HTML and sticking it into a native app shell is a bad idea. I’m not talking about web apps, mind you; I’m talking about apps you get from the App Store or Play Store, but really just run HTML and Javascript. My two main […]
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Changing Plans – Blog Jam

There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]
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My Favorite Line(s) of Code

Onwards to Round 2 in our current blog battle here at SEP. This time I’ve been asked to write about my favorite line(s) of code. Unfortunately, I don’t have some fancy Ruby, Haskell, or Clojure to dazzle you with. My recent tenure spent managing projects leaves me with little time to focus on the latest […]
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What Mobile Platform Should We Target?

We often get clients interested in mobile solutions to their problems. One of the biggest questions they have for us is “what platform should we even target?” iOS? Android? Windows Phone 8? What about BlackBerry? Symbian? Firefox OS? How about Ubuntu Mobile? Do we even want something native, or is a properly tested and designed […]
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Android UI/X – don’t go overboard with your list views

The Android ListView is one of the simplest UI widgets to implement.  There are plenty of ListView tutorials and examples, so I’m not going to talk about how to implement a list. Instead, I’m going to focus on the User Experience and ways to improve your lists. To see a really well implemented ListView, take […]
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Android AsyncTasks, for updating your UI

Last time, I talked about how to use Android Handlers for handling a blocking task in the background.  While Handlers are very powerful, they can easily get too complicated for larger tasks. This time, let’s take a look at the Android AsyncTasks. AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class allows to […]
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Get a List of Months by Locale in Android…

I was working with a client trying to decide on long and short DateFormats for an international mobile application.  (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) I wasn’t able to quickly find any documentation on the Java SimpleDateFormat strings by locale…so I did what any Passionate Programmer would do, and I wrote a method to do it for […]
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