SEP Blog

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Named a Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards

Westfield, IN - January 2022, SEP, a software product design and development firm has been announced as a winning company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards. This recognizes SEP as one of the best tech companies to work for in…

Filter: All Agile Cloud Culture Design Desktop DevOps Embedded & IoT Machine Learning & AI Mobile Practices Programming Sandbox SEP Tips UX Web

3 Xamarin.Forms Tricks to Maximize Shared UI Code in Mobile Development

In 2014 I was tasked with creating a relatively simple iOS/Android app from scratch using this newfangled mobile app development technology called Xamarin.Forms. I was on the project for a total of three days. I had years of C#/WPF experience but none in Xamarin, and this Forms business was the confounding icing on the proverbial […]

Android, Robotium and Spoon: A Practical Guide for Testing on Android Devices

Developing for Android is a lot of fun. It has actually become a niche for me here at SEP. Android has changed quite a bit over the past 3 years since I first started hacking on it – action bars, more screen sizes, and probably the biggest addition…fragments. But one thing certainly has not changed. […]

Android Studio – Not Ready for Primetime

Android Studio is a new IDE that Google has released into Early Access Preview. It is based on the popular IntelliJ editor; the existing development environment relied on an Eclipse plugin. This was really exciting news for SEP engineers that have done Android development. In addition to more the powerful refactoring tools that come with […]

Installing Open Source Android Libraries with Gradle and Android Studio

Android recently started advising developers to use Gradle as their build system for new projects. I don’t really keep up-to-date on the Java ecosystem – and I prefer working in dynamic languages – so I didn’t even really know what a “build system” constituted. All I could think about was nightmares from writing Makefiles in […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Android Handler, in a nutshell…

The most basic way to handle multiple threads is to use the standard Java threads. I won’t cover those in detail in this series; however, there are some good docs and examples online to help with those. By default, Android apps run solely in a single thread – the UI Thread. For most applications, this […]

Cloud

Elevate your big ideas sky-high. Migrate enterprise systems or build native cloud apps with a trusted partner like SEP.

Desktop

In the lab, on the runway, and by the hospital bed, clients trust us to craft reliable desktop software.

Embedded

We have the know-how to build secure embedded systems – whether it’s custom hardware, bare metal, or embedded Linux.

Mobile

Tackle any challenge in your app’s journey with our expertise in building cross-platform and native apps.

Web

Front-end, back-end, or end-to-end, we build incredibly rich web experiences.

Ready for what's next?

Whatever industry you’re in, our custom software development services can help you tackle your toughest challenges. Let’s develop something extraordinary together. ›

Explore