Events

News: 30 Jan 2013 – BB10 launched

bb10-img

RIM are today launching their BB10 OS, which could make or break the firm’s future.

Will it help them to regain ground on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android? Only time (and users) will tell.

TechCrunch are providing live coverage of the BB10 Launch Event as are (unexpectedly!) the Daily Mirror.

During the launch event, it was announced that RIM will now drop the RIM name and become BlackBerry.

And here’s two BlackBerry devices unveiled today – the Z10 and the Q10 – courtesy of the DailyTech website.

BB-Z10BB Q10

 

BlackBerry Z10 & Q10 Reviews:

CNET.com   Z10 Review  Q10 Hands-On

Guardian    Z1o Video Review (with annoying ad!)

Endgadget  Z10 Review

YouTube Video BlackBerry Z10 Reviews:

 

 

 

 

By |January 30th, 2013|Apps, Events, Featured News, featured-posts, Mobile, News, News 2013|0 Comments
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Apps World 2012, Day 2, Wednesday 3 October 2012

Last Wednesday, I went along to Day 2 of Apps World 2012, at Earls Court 2. I went for the full day, as there was more of interest during the morning session, especially around the area of Mobile Testing.

My photos from the day are below, some of dodgy quality as all are via my iPhone. There’s also the official photos available at Apps World blog

Here’s my findings, on the days events:

  • I saw several presentations at the Developer Zone and some of these presentations are now available on the Apps World website, either as Audio and/or Slides downloads. The ones I saw on the day included the following:
  • - At 1040, the presentation on Mobile Testing, by Becky Wetherill of Borland. This dealt with both areas of Mobile Testing and also Borland’s Silk Mobile testing product. One of the interesting points was that due to the number of different devices, screen sizes and O/S combinations, there’s over 100,000 possible device combinations – obviously impossible to test all of those! Therefore, the Edge Strategy is used, to test minimum and maximum O/S versions, on different devices, with minimum and maximum device screen sizes. There all also many factors which affect an Apps performance and behaviour, including O/S Versions, Screen Size and Chipsets.
  • - At 1110, the Applicasa presentation was interesting and eye-catching – their idea being to take Zombie users out of developers Apps and turn them into active/paying users
  • - At 1120, Tim King, the CTO of 5app, gave his forthright presentation on the amount of cowboys in the world of App development.
  • - At 1130, there was a presentation from Grant Skinner, on Building the Atari Arcade in HTML5 & CreateJS. His company got this projects from Microsoft and Atari and was a way of showcasing HTML5, in this case for games.
  • - After lunch, at 1300, there was then a panel from AQuA – the App Quality Alliance –  which is a non-profit organisation created by Sony, Orange, Oracle, Samsung and many others with the aim of promoting App Quality, mainly in the Android area.
  • - At 1330, there was a presentation from PayPal, on simplifying the payment experience. Part of this covered the Mobile Payments Library (MPL) for iOS and Android, which allows developers to build PayPal payments functionality right into their Apps. Another interesting fact I picked up was that PayPal provide a global test platform at developer.paypal.com where developers and testers can test the whole payment process – including multi-currencies and multi-countries. This allows all use cases to be tested before going live. Dev resources can be found at x.com/mobile and x.com/developers/paypal. Tech support is also available at paypal.com/mts.

 

The whole area of Mobile Payments is an interesting and intriguing one, as it seems to be where everything is heading more and more. With so many competing Mobile Payments technologies it will be interesting to see who’ll be left standing after the coming period of consolidation – surely it won’t just be PayPal? I think testing these different types of Mobile Payments is an interesting challenge, made more difficult by the sheer variety of payment options.

At Apps World, I talked to the following Mobile Payments companies briefly, some of which I’d heard of, some of which I hadn’t:

  • Zooz – they provide an SDK to developers, so they can then choose which payment options to enable for their users. They provide a sandbox for testing.
  • iZettle – similar to Square, they use a dongle to read card details and an App on the Mobile device to do the payment processing.
  • Payoneer – they provide global payment solutions, where payments are made to a prepaid Mastercard, ideal for international freelancers etc who need to be paid for their work via different online work platforms.

Overall, Apps World was well worth attending, a good way of networking and finding out the latest trends and news in the Apps World, with areas of interest for both developers and testers.

 

By |October 9th, 2012|Android, Android App Testing, App Testing, Apple, Apps, Development, Events, iMac, iOS, iOS App Testing, Middleware Testing, Mobile, Mobile Testing, New Tech, open source, Selenium, Software Testing, Sony, Twitter, Website Testing|0 Comments
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Apps World 2012, Day 1, Tuesday 2 October 2012

 

Earls Court 2

Last Tuesday, I went to the first day of Apps World 2012, at Earls Court 2. I went along to see what I could find out about the latest Apps and App Technologies, plus also to do some networking.

Event photos from Apps World blog

Here’s my findings, in random order:

  • For Earls Court 2, use West Brompton tube station, which is just across the road. Earls Court tube station is about a 10-15 minute walk instead.
  • I noticed from the floorplan that the guys from BugFinders were there, so I met up with them on Day 2
  • It was the first time I’d heard of AQuA – the App Quality Alliance – which comprises some large companies including AT&T, Orange, Oracle, Samsung and Sony Mobile. They’ve also just launched their Quality App Directory. It all seems targeted at Android Apps, at least initially.
  • Compuware were at the event and on the sponsors list. I didn’t see a stand of theirs, but I did pass a meeting room which had their name on it, which was a bit unusual.
  • I attended several presentations at the Developer Zone. Some of these presentations are now available on the Apps World website, either as Audio and/or Slides downloads. The presentations I saw at the event included:
  • - Tizen, which was delivered by Cheng Luo of Samsung. Tizen is a different O/S for mobile phones, using HTML5.
  • - RhoMobile, delivered by Adam Blum, Product Manager of RhoMobile, now part of Motorola Solutions. A development platform to enable writing native apps for all platforms, using HTML5, Javascript and Ruby.
  • - GeoLocation Panel – This dealt with integrating location based services (LBS) into your apps. On the panel were people from Hailo, Telmap, runtastic and sensewhere.
  • Your Local M8 – User experience in your LBS mobile app. This was delivered by Shani Avnet, User Experience expert at Telmap, now part of Intel. This went over the LBS features in the M8 iOS App, also covered UI challenges and solutions when dealing with LBS in your App, plus also the potential for integration with other Apps.
  • - The Appsters – for best ‘Startup App’ – this was interesting, as several Startup App developers got a few minutes to pitch their new App and try and receive votes via Twitter, for that nights The Appsters Awards. #the_appsters
  • - Among those pitch their Startup Apps were My Guide (Social Travel), Goldstar Savings Bank, Brush DJ (thanks for the free toothbrush by the way!), Soundrop (Enabling social music discovery in Spotify) and Whats This (a photo based game)
As you can see from the above list, there was a lot to see and that was just in the afternoon.

 

By |October 6th, 2012|Android, Android App Testing, App Testing, Apple, Apps, Development, Events, iOS, iOS App Testing, New Tech, Software Testing|0 Comments
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Webinar – Intro to Mobile Web App Testing with Selenium & Sauce

I recently attended this webinar, given by Jonathan Lipps of Sauce Labs. You can check out the webinar on YouTube.

I’ll briefly outline the main points, for future reference.

Webinar Intro

  • Almost as easy to test web apps with Sauce / Selenium as it is to test websites
  • Automated Testing – can be run every time you check in code for example, also when you refactor code in your library or when you need to regression test

Functional Testing with Selenium

  • Closely analogous to manual QA
  • Likened it to a robot-controlled browser
  • Selenium controls a real web browser with real web interactions
  • Good at showing up cross-browser issues
  • Available as a library in most languages

Writing Selenium Scripts

  • Selenium RC – is the original version
  • Now superseded by Selenium WebDriver
  • WebDriver recommended to use for any new work
  • Much faster than RC
  • WebDriver is client-server architecture

Script, Selenium Web server, Browser Combination

Script-Selenium-Browser

The item to the left in the above screenshot represents a script (in Python, PHP etc) and this interacts with the Selenium Web server, shown in the middle, which in turn interacts with the browser (Chrome, IE, Safari, Firefox etc)

Running Tests on Sauce Labs Platforms

If using Sauce Labs as the test platform, the model now changes. The script (in Python, PHP etc) now interacts directly with Sauce Labs cloud, using Sauce Connect, which allows Sauce Labs cloud to connect to your local host development machine (which is normally detached from the outside world)

Specific Mobile Issues with Selenium

  • Different screen real estate (and different on iPhone and Android and tablets etc)
  • Different devices have different ways of handling text (so your tests have to cope with this – eg iOS capitalises first character in text input)
  • Objects not visible when you expect them to be
  • Advised to do some manual testing when writing automated tests, so you can see how it looks on device

Selenium and Hybrid Apps and Native Apps

  • Selenium currently can be used to test websites and mobile web apps
  • Selenium does not currently work with Hybrid Apps (web apps wrapped inside a native app) or Native Apps.
  • They are hoping to soon be able to test Hybrid Apps and Native Apps from Selenium.

Final Thoughts on Sauce Labs and Selenium

  • Sauce Labs currently use Emulators but plan to use real devices in the future
  • Mobile Test Automation is quite a new area – but gaining in momentum
  • Mobile Test Summit is on 1 November 2012, in San Francisco – where lots of like-minded people will gather together and discuss/debate to push mobile testing forward – especially in area of testing native apps with Selenium.

 

 

By |September 29th, 2012|Apple, Development, Events, iMac, Mobile, New Tech, open source, OSX, Python, Selenium, Software Testing, Webinar, Website Testing|0 Comments
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Webinar – Intro to Selenium2Library & Robot Framework (also Cucumber & Gherkin)

I recently attended a webinar on the uTest platform, which was titled “Intro to Selenium2Library & Robot Framework”. I hadn’t heard of Selenium2Library or the Robot Framework, so this was a really useful intro to both of these at once. Also there was some information on Cucumber and Gherkin, as used in Acceptance Testing. You can check out the webinar on YouTube.

I’ll briefly outline what I learnt here, for future reference.

Robot Framework

Selenium2Library

  • Python implementation of Selenium WebDriver, for use with Google Robot Framework
  • Uses Open Browser commands and BuiltIn library

Installation on Mac OSX

Robot Framework installation:

  • Requires Python – already on most Macs
  • To install Robot Framework – use pip install robotframework
  • To check its been installed – type pybot –version

Selenium2Library installation:

  • Use github
  • or use easy_install

Cucumber & Gherkin

  • Cucumber is a tool for automated Acceptance Tests
  • Gherkin is used in Acceptance Testing and is the language used in Cucumber
  • Natural language format, similar to user stories
  • Agile way of specifying software requirements
  • Often specified by business and then given to developers

Example Keywords in Gherkin

  • Scenario …
  • Given …
  • When …
  • Then …
  • AND …
  • BUT …

Gherkin Example

Given I have an existing blog account
When I login as user Bert
Then I can see blog welcome page

My Observations on the Robot Framework

  • Robot Framework coding looks a lot like Python coding, with the same indents and spacing – so easy to read, if you know Python.
  • The Robot Framework files shown in the webinar had the format of:
  • Settings
  • Variables
  • Keywords
  • Was described as a good tool to enable non-technical testers to write Gherkin tests – with developers then adding keywords (and processing coding) that the non-technical testers may need for their tests.
By |September 28th, 2012|Development, Events, iMac, New Tech, open source, OSX, Python, Selenium, Software Testing, uTest.com, Webinar, Website Testing|0 Comments
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I went to Silicon Milkroundabout 2012

Updated… added article links, blog links and YouTube links. 

Here are some article links and blog links from other people who went to Silicon Milkroundabout 2012, I’ll keep checking for any more and add them in as and when I find them.

By Wilde Hart
http://wildehart.com/2012/05/29/silicon-milkroundabout/
By Dan Maharry, on a .NET perspective
http://blog.hmobius.com/post/2012/05/29/Looking-for-NET-at-Silicon-Milkroundabout.aspx
By Geekonomicon
http://geekonomicon.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/silicon-milkroundabout-3-0/
The Economist 
http://www.economist.com/node/21556286

YouTube videos
Siliconmilkround channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/siliconmilkround
Various time lapse videos of the event
http://youtu.be/MQZsY2Kcz2o

My Original Post: 
Yesterday – Sunday 27 May – I went to Silicon Milkroundabout, the job fair for startups looking to hire techies of all types.

My main impression is that it was an excellent event, giving job hunters (like me) and companies the chance to discuss their products and the job opportunities they had. Among the people I talked to were CTOs, Dev Team Leaders, Developers and also Company Founders, so it was a great chance to talk to people who are already working at the companies.

On Saturday I had done some prep and checked out all the companies attending, to see which ones I should focus on seeing, this took a while to do but was very valuable as there were about 100 companies there and this prep enabled me to see the companies I really wanted to chat to, rather than randomly talking to anyone.

It was very hot inside the Truman Brewery building, not really designed for 28C temperatures, but the free bar really helped everyone to cool down and was also a good place to have a chat to other techie types. It was a nice touch to have a free bar in a former brewery!

When entering the building they had a proper registration check, where they checked my registration/email address, once this was done, they gave me a great little booklet, which had details of all the companies there including details of what the company does and what roles they’re hiring for.

Well done to Pete Smith of Songkick who started up the event and it looks to have a great future. This is the sort of thing that the government should be organising (eg Vince Cable and his mates) but then they’d probably mess it up.

Now I’m in follow up mode, getting in touch with the companies I had a good chat with, hopefully it might lead to an exciting job in the world of startups.

Blog entries

http://jimmytidey.co.uk/blog/silicon-milk-roundabout/

Links:

http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/

There are also Silicon Milkroundabout groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.

 

By |May 28th, 2012|Development, Events, Job Fairs|1 Comment
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Silicon Milkroundabout 2012 – Sunday 27 May

This Sunday I’m off to check out the job fair action at Silicon Milkroundabout, at the Old Truman Brewery, near Brick Lane, London. This is where UK tech startup companies aim to hire developers, designers, testers and all sorts of tech types. According to the FAQ, they’re hiring those with experience from 1 to 40 years, so not just those fresh out of uni.

To register to attend, go to http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/

There are events on Saturday 26 May for ‘Product Managers and Designers’ and Sunday 27 May for ‘Technical’ types.

Among those companies attending are:

  • Moo
  • Badoo (also sponsoring free bar and chillout area!)
  • Songkick (also sponsoring free coffee)
  • Mind Candy (also sponsoring free fruit)
  • Shazam
  • 7digital
  • Twitter
  • QuBit
  • CityMapper London
  • ViaGoGo
  • Huddle
  • Yammer
  • And loads, loads more – the full list is at http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/companies

Below is an audio interview with Songkick Founder Pete Smith who also started up Silicon Milkroundabout, well worth a listen if you’re going.

Here’s some links to previous attendees thoughts:

 

By |May 26th, 2012|Development, Events|2 Comments
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