Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Microsoft Windows 9 for Connected Objects


With the new version of its operating system Windows 9, Microsoft wants to attack the connected objects market and more generally IoT (Internet of Things). They will release a free of charge version of Windows specially for this market.

It's official. Microsoft has indeed launch an assault on the connected devices market.  Bernard Ourghanlian, CTO at Microsoft France confirms the rumors. The next OS Windows 9, that will be presented the September 30th 2014 to enterprises and developers, will be optimized for all kind of devices. "A version will propose for connected objects" said Bernard Ourghanlian "It will use very little memory and can run on as little as Intel processors Quark." And this will be free of charge. " as is already the case for Windows 8.1 in April 2014 to all terminals equipped a screen less than 9 inches" said Nicolas Petit, director of marketing and operations.

So Microsoft attacks directly Google and his system Android Wear, which launched in March 2014 a version of its Android OS dedicated to connected objects. The battle of the OS in the connected objects will therefor intensify.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Glassware - Media Gallery v0.3



Google released a new version for the Google Glass : XE16 and XE16.1. This release is a big gap, now Google Glass are based on KITKAT.

Google changed also the API, the last version of Media Gallery v0.2 is not compatible with XE16.

Now, if you want to use a unlisted voice command to launch the application, you need to add this permission :

  • <uses-permission android:name="com.google.android.glass.permission.DEVELOPMENT" />
But to publish an application in MyGlass you need to use a listed voice command... It's really restricted, because you need to apply to ask your own command via this form : Voice command form. Google needs to approve you request and after... wait a new release...

I try to publish my app in MyGlass because I would like to implement the Authentication in GDK but to test, you need to upload in MyGlass so apply to the process review.

04/27/2014 - I applied to create a new voice command. I will keep you in touch about the process. Also I started the process to publish my app in MyGlass without voice command...


http://fablanglet.github.io/MediaGallery/

You can download the latest version : Media Gallery v0.3

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Glassware - MediaGallery v0.2


I released a new version of my glassware : MediaGallery.

I included some optimizations, and the possibility to pause and resume a video. Also I display the current time and total duration of the video and a seek bar to see where you are in video.

I created a new GitHub Page specially for this application.

http://fablanglet.github.io/MediaGallery/

You can download the latest version : Media Gallery v0.2

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

1 Invitation Glass Explorer

Hi,

I have 1 invitation for a potential Glass Explorer, if you are interested add a comment, follow me on Google+ or Twitter, click on the ads and Get a chance to be a Glass Explorer.
I will contact the better clicker to get his email and send him the invitation :)


The invitation is still available during the next 7 days....

Google Glass Apps Directory

Hi,

I would like to share with you a very cool initiative : Google Glass Directory Website

On this website, you can find a lot of different useful Glassware :

  1. Glass Music Player
  2. VideoBlack
    • Record video with the screen off
    • Link
  3. WeMoGlassu
    • Application for controlling Belkin WeMo devices trough Google Glass
    • Link
It is a non-exhaustive list of the Glassware available on the repository...

Thanks to the Iwan to add my Glassware in the directory : Media Manager

If you want to contribute in this initiative : http://igg.me/at/glass-apps

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

SEO - Single Page Websites

In this article, we will see how to optimized the ranking of your single page application. Today, the single page website development is really common. It exists a lot of frameworks to create single page website like AngularJS, BackboneJS...

But the problem when you try to index your website in Google or Bing, just the html page will be index. That means just 1 entry with only 1 title and description. It is not really good  if your website is composed of many pages.

Adapt your webapp

Google provides a solution to crawl the dynamically created content :
  • Don't use only the # as Hash fragment, replace it by #!
    • Google will replace the hash fragment with exclamation mark by _escaped_fragment_
    • http://www.exemple.com/#toto => http://www.example.com/#!toto
    • Url GoogleBot : http://www.example.com/?_escaped_fragment_=toto
  • Add a trigger to the head of the HTML of a page
    • <meta name="fragment" content="!">
Now Google or Bing will be able to crawl all the page of your website.  The next step is to return the html page or content for the good hash fragment.

Adapt your Backend

If you use NodeJs to host you webapp my suggestion is to read this good post : Easily index your SPA thanks to PhantomJS

In my case, I could not use this trick because my single page app is hosted on Apache and I can not install external tools...
So my solution is to use the .htaccess to create a redirection on pre-render pages. To pre-render a page you can use PhantomJS or an other tools to create a html file for each page. 

You can create an automatic script to generate these pages. Also you can modify the title and the description meta tag for each page.
After create a folder seo/ on your server, hosted all your html pages on it. 

.htaccess

Create the .htaccess file in your root folder, with this following content :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^_escaped_fragment_=(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ seo/%1.html [NC,L]
</IfModule>

This code means if the url contains _escaped_fragment_=, we redirect the call to the prerender html page.
The html must have the same name of your hash fragment toto.html in my previous example.

You can test your rule with the "Fetch as Google" in Crawl menu on Google Webmaster Tool.

Now Google, Bing and the other can index all the pages of your single page application!!!

Sources : Google specification Ajax Crawling

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Glassware - Media Gallery v0.1



In this topic, I propose a Glassware to manage your photos and video.

You can view, play and delete your photos and video directly with this app with swipe,swipe and swipe in your Timeline. And you can not find the picture or the video you want in the middle of your notifications.

It's a beta version, but I publish it because I read a lot of comments on the glass-community forum that it is not easy to manage the picture on the timeline.

I agree with all these comments, that's why I decided to develop this Glassware during my free-time.

Actual features :

  • Display pictures/ videos
  • Play/Stop video
  • Delete pictures/videos
  • Swipe back/forward to navigate
  • Tap to show the menu


The next features I want to add are :

  • Look & Feel : Add icon to know if it's photo or video
  • Feature : 
    • Add informations about the media itself
    • Send a picture by email
You can download the application here : Media Gallery 0.1

To install, you need to have the ADT Bundle installed on your computer. More informations available here.

And run the command : adb install GalleryPicture.0.1.apk
adb tool is available on sdk/platform_tools/

Let me know if you need other features, or if you have any comments or concerns about this Glassware.

Screenshot






Enjoy it!