• Read more about Ken Fang Named to Monte Jade Board

Monte Jade DC has recently announced that they have nominated Mobomo’s President, Ken Fang, as their Chairman of the Board. Ken has been on the Monte Jade DC board since 2013.

“It is indeed a great honor to be nominated to lead this great organization. Over the past few years of involvement with Monte Jade, I have seen incredible relationships grow as business owners connect, students and mentors learn from one another, and professionals network to build bonds with one another. It is a fantastic connection for the Asian community in DC."

Monte Jade is an organization that aids in resources for starting, funding and growing high technology businesses. Their commitment is to assist future entrepreneurs, students, researchers, scientists, scholars and business people to advance their careers in becoming leaders and executives in their organizations or assist those that have interest in becoming entrepreneurs and business owners. They accomplish this through the experience and knowledge our prestigious board and other key members that include C-level executives, managers, and directors leading, operating, and developing some of the most successful science and technology firms in the Greater Washington area.

Ken Fang is the President of Mobomo, primarily overseeing the strategy and operations of the company. He works closely with clients to create mobile solutions to meet their strategic needs, and is adept at developing apps on all major mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and mobile web. In addition to running Mobomo, Ken is the founder and chairman of Altum, Inc., the market leader of enterprise grants management and performance management solutions for federal and philanthropic organizations. Ken has published a number of titles and articles in educational software and advanced computing technology. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University, an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a certificate in Bioinformatics from Stanford University.

• Read more about Blackberry Tip: Change the default focus highlight color of ListField

In Blackberry Java application development, every row in ListField has the default blue focus highlight color. There is no simple setter to change it. One way to change it is to overwrite the 'drawFocus' method. I'm going to walk you through the steps to change that.

Suppose we have a list to display each news feed from an RSS; we need to customize the row so that it looks like this:

In the non-focus state, the title of the news feed is in black, the date info is in gray, and the background color for the row is white. For the focus state the colors will be changed: the row gets a red highlight color and the title/date fields will get white. Here is the code:

protected void drawFocus(Graphics graphics, boolean on) {     //get the focus rect area     XYRect focusRect = new XYRect();     getFocusRect(focusRect);      boolean oldDrawStyleFocus = graphics.isDrawingStyleSet(Graphics.DRAWSTYLE_FOCUS);     try {         if (on) {            //set the style so the fields in the row will update its color accordingly             graphics.setDrawingStyle(Graphics.DRAWSTYLE_FOCUS, true);             int oldColour = graphics.getColor();             try {                 graphics.setColor(Color.RED); //set the color and draw the color                 graphics.fillRect(focusRect.x, focusRect.y,                                   focusRect.width, focusRect.height);             } finally {                 graphics.setColor(oldColour);             }             //to draw the row again             drawListRow(this, graphics, getSelectedIndex(),                         focusRect.y, focusRect.width);         }      } finally {       graphics.setDrawingStyle(Graphics.DRAWSTYLE_FOCUS, oldDrawStyleFocus);     } } 

The idea is to draw the customized highlight color and then draw the selected row again. The drawListRow method will draw each row; suppose we have the title field’s paint method like this:

protected void paint(Graphics g) {     try {         g.setColor(g.isDrawingStyleSet(Graphics.DRAWSTYLE_FOCUS)                    ? textFocusColor : textUnFocusColor);         g.drawText(__line1, PADDING_LEFT, PADDING_TOP);          if (__line2 != null) {             g.setDrawingStyle(DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS, true);             g.drawText(__line2, PADDING_LEFT, PADDING_TOP + _font.getHeight());         }     } finally {         if (__line2 != null) {             g.setDrawingStyle(DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS, false);         }     } } 

Here the title takes 2 lines at most. And the paint method will be invoked by its manager from the drawListRow method. Check back for more Blackberry tips on our blog in the future!

• Read more about The Apple/Google Android Mobile Horse Race

Recent reports about Apple and Google mobile market shares might seem a bit contradictory, but the gist of them is fairly simple: both companies are winning in the mobile space.

According to a recent report from Canalys, Apple has taken the U.S. smartphone share lead for Q3 2010 with just over 26% marketshare -- edging out 2nd-place RIM by only 2%. But in terms of mobile OS, Android maintained its previous U.S. lead, with close to 44% for Q3 2010. However, consumer researcher NPG Group's findings show that Google's Android mobile OS's U.S. share jumped considerably (3% to 44%) between Q3 2009 and Q3 2010, whereas Apple and RIM have fallen in that time period -- RIM considerably, by a drop of 24% in that one year period.

On the flipside, both Apple and RIM won with handsets. Apple's iPhone 4 and RIM's BlackBerry Curve 8500 took first and second spots, respectively, in Q3 2010 as top handsets. High-end Android phones such as Motorola Droid X and HTC EVO 4G, which took 4th and 5th places, respectively, are examples of handsets that have helped Android move into and maintain top mobile OS spot.

Of course, since Android has multiple active versions in the wild and is not limited to one manufacturer's handsets, it's not surprising that this mobile OS is in the lead. Also, it doesn't hurt that there are some pretty sexy high-end Android smartphones competing with Apple's iPhones. I recently purchased a Droid X for Android development and I have to say I'm liking the phone about as much as my iPhone 3GS. I also like the Android experience, though that may change once I get an iPhone 4.

Now the question is, can Android maintain its lead as top mobile OS (at least for the U.S.)? Android apps are available in multiple "marketplaces" (including Google's official one), and that number is going to grow. For example, Barnes & Noble is coming out later this month with their Nook Color, an Android-based media tablet that has maybe not the ability to compete with the Apple iPad but to do well if marketed properly. However, taking a page from Apple's strategy, B&N plans to have its own curated marketplace for Nook Color apps. Similarly, wireless carrier Verizon already has its own VCast apps market for Android.

Whether marketplace, OS version and UI fragmentation is good for Android or not remains to be seen; Google is apparently making an effort to unify the Android UI experience for consumers. The fact is that there's a lot of confidence in the OS. According to Millenial Media's State of the App Industry 2010 Report, a survey of app developers and app publishers suggests that the top mobile platforms for 2011 will be, from highest to lowest, iPhone (30%), Android (23%), iPad (21%), RIM (12%), Windows Mobile (6%), Palm (5%), and Symbian (3%) [via ReadWriteWeb and Venture Beat]. Of course, those numbers might change as Android tablets -- which will on average be lower-priced than iPads -- come to market.

Need advice on a mobile apps strategy for your business? Just want to know how you can leverage the mobile platform in general? Feel free to contact us to discuss your app idea or mobile campaign needs.

• Read more about Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu

Let's face it, iPhone interfaces are awesome, but they can only cater to a fraction of the mobile market. What are you to do if you want to satisfy the rest of the mobile world? Mobile Fu helps to make this job much easier by automatically detecting mobile devices that access your Rails application. People can access your site from a Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. and it will automatically adjust the format of the request from :html to :mobile.

Learn Mobile Fu

First off, just install the Mobile Fu plugin into your Rails application.

script/plugin install git://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu.git

Start by adding this one line to your ApplicationController.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base    has_mobile_fu  end

Once this is in place, any request that comes from a mobile device will be be set as :mobile format. It is up to you to determine how you want to handle these requests by creating the .mobile.erb versions of your views that are to be requested. Also, I recommend that you setup a before_filter that will redirect to a specific page depending on whether or not it is a mobile request. How can you check this?

is_mobile_device? # => Returns true or false depending on the device

You can also determine which format is currently set in by calling the method below.

in_mobile_view? # => Returns true or false depending on current req. format

If you want the ability to allow a user to switch between ˜mobile' and ˜standard' format (:html), you can just adjust the mobile_view session variable in a custom controller action.

session[:mobile_view] # => Set to true if request format is :mobile and false                             if set to :html

What About Custom Mobile Styling?

Different devices need different styling. Don't worry though, we've got this baked in to Mobile Fu (thanks to Intridea's own Michael Bleigh, who created Browserized Styles for letting me modify his code). If you are including a css or sass file via stylesheet_link_tag, all you have to do is add _device to the name of one of your files to override your styling for a certain device. The stylesheet that is loaded is dependant on which device is making the request.

Supported stylesheet override device extensions at the moment are: blackberry, iphone, mobileexplorer, nokia, palm

e.g., Accessing a page from a Blackberry.          Ends up loading mobile.css, and mobile_blackberry.css if the file exists.

Feature Requests

You can check out Mobile Fu's very own project page at Acts As Community. If you have any problems or would like me to add a certain feature, please create a ticket at http://blim.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14490-mobile-fu/. Also, feel free to fork Mobile Fu and make any enhancements you please from its GitHub location at: http://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu/tree/master