Integrating Hardware into a Software System Integrating hardware with software is often a tricky business. The difficulty is that hardware, unlike the (relatively) consistent world of software, can be unpredictable. Software can be tested quite thoroughly using many testing environments, with different OS versions to ensure compatibility. When you add hardware into the equation, things […]
Power Cut Reporting App
We recently worked, with another local agency, on the Android version of a smartphone based power cut reporting app for one of the major electricity suppliers. The Power Cut Reporter app provides support, assistance and, interaction. Enabling customers to report power outages and seek assistance. Wherever you are, with the ‘Report a power cut’ feature […]
Integrating Apps with Dropbox
Just a quick note to say that we’re finding an ever increasing number of uses for Dropbox. This is mainly because the Dropbox API is a superbly efficient way to connect apps to Dropbox, which makes integrating apps with Dropbox a breeze. We find loads of our clients already use Dropbox for storing data. So […]
Surelock – a new solution to the “kiosk mode” problem
We’ve written previously about the problems of locking devices down into “kiosk mode”. At the time of that article, the best option appeared to be Samsung Knox as long as you were happy to use a compatible device. Since then we’ve been asked for another “kiosk” app and a further review of the options threw […]
iText PDF Generation on Android
There are remarkably few options for reliably generating PDF documents from within an Android app. We’ve had to do this a few times, particularly for generating invoices to be sent from apps used by delivery drivers and for output from our FormsOnMobile product. The best solution we’ve found is iText programmable PDF software. There’s a […]
DialToSave app
DialToSave has been providing discount international calls for UK consumers since 2002. Earlier this year we completed a simple Android app to allow smartphone users to quickly and easily make cheap rate calls using the DialToSave service. TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS – Simple and intuitive interface designed by Bearded Hen. – Easily browse international phone rates for […]
Bearded Hen’s third birthday!
Bearded Hen will be 3 years old soon. As we haven’t spoken in a while, we thought you might like to know what we’ve been up to. We saw the rapid rise of Android driven devices… So we aimed our combined 50+ years of experience in software development towards building a firm with […]
50″ Android TV – the world’s largest tablet?
We’ve just taken delivery of the first 50″ Android TV off the production line. That’s not a TV and set-top box, and it’s not casting an Android screen onto a regular TV, it’s one appliance that’s both a fully functioning TV and a fully functioning Android device. OK it doesn’t have a touchscreen (that would […]
“Kiosk mode” – how to lock down Android devices to one app for demos, shows and more…
There are a number of ways to lock the user into an app – but Android currently doesn’t make it easy. The most basic solution is to place the phone or tablet in a physical housing which prevents buttons being pressed and hides the status and navigation bars, but trying to source such a housing […]
The faster you move into the future …
The more you have to deal with legacy issues: We’re just putting the finishing touches to an app for handling brewery deliveries to pubs and bars. At the start of the day, a list of deliveries and collections is loaded onto the device, the driver makes their round delivering (and collecting) beer casks, bottles and […]