With an estimated 3.2 billion smartphone users in 2019, the mobile app
industry is growing and not showing any signs of slowing down. Along
with this growth in smartphone usage comes increased demands and
expectations from end users. Apps need to use the latest smartphone
features, be fast & easy to use. This is further complicated with the
need to develop for both Android and Apple smartphones as well as
tablets. For someone with an app idea, considering all these factors
can be a bit overwhelming. This is where Infinity Interactive steps
in. Infinity has extensive experience in the mobile app arena and can
help you identify the best approach for your app and target audience.
Today, companies are not just restricted to developing a native mobile
app. They can also build mobile web apps, progressive web apps, and
cross-platform apps. This post will cover the pros and cons of each
with the hope of giving a clear path for taking an app idea into app
reality.
…read more
At Infinity, we’ve been a fully remote, on-shore tech consultancy and
custom software development company since 2005 (founded in 1998), so a
lot of our friends and contacts have been asking us for advice on
effectively managing remote co-working. We thought it would be helpful
to share some of our tips and tricks from both the leadership and
employee perspectives.
…read more
Even on mobile, sometimes you need to show people a PDF. In your Xamarin Android app, for most situations, having the user download the document to view it outside of the app using Android's native document viewer is probably fine. But what if the design specifies displaying the document in the app? And what if that document is 100+ pages long? We recently ran into this here at Infinity Interactive and needless to say, displaying a PDF in your Xamarin Android app is not as straightforward as one might expect.
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In the beginning, there were iOS, Android, and the Web. Entirely separate
platforms that had to be developed as such.
Then, along came Xamarin. Developers could write iOS and Android apps
using a single codebase, but we were still on our own for Web development.
Now, Uno has emerged. Building on top of Xamarin, it gives us the
power to write iOS, Android, Web, and even UWP applications using
shared logic and UI!
…read more
Cloud functions are a great way to run small programmatic services in the
cloud. They are easy to create and use, are very secure, and need little
maintenance. They even scale on-demand in a way that is very difficult to
achieve using regular servers.
…read more
About seven months ago, I started practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a grappling
art founded in Brazil. Immediately after, I began comparing everything to it.
My kids started making fun of me: “Everything is Jiu-Jitsu for you, Dada.” And,
they were right. If I was reading, I’d say, “I’m grappling with the book.” If I
was cooking, I’d say, “I’m Jiu-Jitsuing food.” If my five-year-old daughter
asked me to help her cut her food during dinner, I’d say, “Just Jiu-Jitsu it.
Pin it down with your fork so it won’t move. Then, cut it.”
…read more
Here at Infinity Interactive, we are an entirely remote team. As such,
high availability of our communication tools is paramount to our
success. Our daily methods of communication include JIRA, email,
commit messages, and even, gasp, telephones. While these are
effective at doing their job, they are not a replacement for that
“human” feel you get when you go into an office and have the ability
to have group and individual conversations with your co-workers. For
that piece of the puzzle, we use Slack.
…read more
System monitoring. A pretty vital part of any network management.
That is, unless you're one of the few who live for the visceral thrill
of flying blind. For the rest of us partial to our lack of heart condition,
an ounce of prevention is worth ten thousand gallons of Saturday morning
intervention.
In this blog entry, I'll go through the exercise of putting
together a simple but working and easily
extensible system monitoring setup leveraging common pieces of technology.
…read more
In an ecosystem riddled with large, portentous frameworks,
Redux is a refreshingly ascetic
little store management system. Driven more by its functional
programming-inspired tenets than supporting code, it offers — and
needs — only a few helper functions to manage its stores.
Minimalism is good. It's also a good idea to abstract oft-used
patterns into more expressive forms. Ideally, code should be crafted
such that its intent comes out on first read, while making deeper digs
possible when required.
Happily enough, the judicious use of delightfully succinct
higher-order functions is often all that's required to tailor-suit
some ergonomics into the manipulation of middleware and reducers. This
blog entry will showcase some of those helper functions that work for
me.
This article assumes you're already familiar with Redux. If this isn't
the case, you might want to check out first one of my
previous articles,
which provides a gentler, if a tad unconventional, introduction to the
framework.
…read more
Yesterday marked our 20th anniversary.
It’s been an awesome ride and we’re grateful for the opportunity to
have enjoyed every moment with so many wonderful partners, clients,
and colleagues. This weekend, I had an opportunity to spend a few
minutes to sit back and reflect on the experiences of the past twenty
years as well as the path forward to the next twenty.
…read more
