After the success of our Annual Bible Lectureship application, demand for other "event" applications quickly grew.

Our development team began work on a basic wireframe to allow easy configuration and deployment of iOS apps for our various campus events. While we have mainly concentrated on iOS, we do plan to implement an Adroid version of this application.

Pictured to the right, is an unfinished implementation of one of our upcoming event apps, HORIZONS 2013. The app contains all of the essential information: event dates, event schedule, session details, a campus map, and a link for video streaming for those events with live streaming capabilities.

For the third year, Web Services is collaborating with our senior computer science majors to produce a significant application for the university. Instead of an iOS application we decided to implement our virtual tour as a web application.  

Work on this application began January 24. The project is coming along very well. Here is a screenshot of how our virtual tour is taking shape:

As a web developer, from time to time my applications don't work exactly as expected.

Sometimes there are bugs in the development phase that keep my apps from performing the way that I think they should.

Sometimes these are my fault, sometimes I find that these are small "bugs" or items that don't work as expected witin the frameworks that I might use.

After debugging apps, performance tuning is one of the other tasks of optimizing your app that can seem rather daunting.
There are many factors to consider with this task.

Here is an article that deals with .NET performance tuning: http://www.techbubbles.com/microsoft/performance-tuning-for-net-applications

It discusses some of the basics of optimization and gives a few cases of memory bottlenecks that might occur and how to fix them.
There are also a few tools and strategies discussed.

For those of us out there that are .NET developers, here's a good article to help you get started on Objective-C: lostechies.com
It was a good read. It contained several beneficial tidbits of information.

iOS 6 was released to the public on Wednesday the 19th. I was looking forward to seeing what Apple had in store (I hadn't been able to play with any of the beta releases) so I quickly downloaded and installed the new software. Here's my first impressions of the things I like and didn't like about iOS 6.

Like

• App Store - I'm a big fan of the new App Store. It's much easier to use and a lot less annoying. The biggest thing I like is how it no longer kicks you out when downloading a new app or an update. I'm all the time perusing the top lists to find something new to try and find it annoying to have to re-open the App Store and find my spot again. With iOS 6, I don't have to.
• Maps - The horror! Consider me one of the few that likes the new Maps app. Granted, I don't live in the largest of cities (large city and Henderson are not two things that are ever used together). Sure, it may place random restaurant X in the wrong place or gas station Y doesn't exist, but as long as it gets me in the general vicinity I can usually find my way. I love how the maps are vector based so it's clear no matter the zoom level and the turn by turn directions are good enough for me.

Dislike

• New Stock Apps - I don't like a lot of apps on my iPhone. In fact, I've shoved as many of the stock apps that I don't use into an  Apps folder (Compass, Voice Memos, Stocks, etc.). I don't see myself using the new Passbook app mainly because I don't use the services it provides (movie tickets, airline passes, etc.). To me it's just more clutter I have to manage.
• Facebook Sync - Let me be clear and say that I love the Facebook integration. I hardly ever post on Facebook (my last post was August 23rd), but I find it handy that I can post to Facebook directly just as I can Twitter. That said, I hate the Facebook contact sync. I'm friends with people on Facebook that I haven't talked to in 5 or more years. I have no need to sync their contact information and creating more clutter. I really wish I could do a selective sync of my Facebook contacts.

Overall, I consider the jump from iOS 5 to iOS 6 to be a big improvement and well worth it. Now I'm looking forward to iOS 7!