Refreshing the Unplugged Logo

Over the past few years, we’ve made several changes and updates to our Unplugged product. And today, we’re happy to announce an update to the Unplugged logo.

The mobile market has grown and continues to evolve, and we felt it was time for a change. We've refreshed our logo to reflect who we are and represent our dynamic future. Our commitment to Unplugged and the mobilization of applications is stronger than ever.

You'll notice the logo change when you visit our website after 10:00am EST this morning and we'll also be making announcements on our social media channels. 

We appreciate the support of our advocates, followers and friends. And we hope you like the new Unplugged logo as much as we do.

How to Select Multiple Documents with XPages Mobile Controls

On a recent mobile (not Unplugged) project I was using the IBM Mobile Controls, included in Designer, and I needed to produce a list of entries from a View source with checkbox selectors to delete multiple entries if required -- the sort of thing one would find in a to-do app or similar. 

After trying to use a Checkbox control in various supported areas in the Data View control (from the Extension Library Controls Palette) I couldn't get this working and in frustration turned to Google to see if someone else had figured out what to do. 

This question had been on IdeaJam, but was unresolved. So I figured I'd get this completed and share how I'd achieved it.

As this was outside the realm of Unplugged and was more an IBM Mobile Controls issue, I contacted David Leedy and he agreed to add it to a series of videos he’s currently producing, focused on XPages Mobile Development. I’m quite excited that my first contribution to this excellent educational resource for XPages developers is now released. 

If you want to see how I solved this problem head over to Notes In 9 and check out the video.

While you're there, have a look around as there are some really great XPages learning videos and they are all around the 10 min mark, so they're quick and easy to absorb. 

For more information on unplugged mobile controls, read our blogpost on the launch: The Launch of Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls

A Look at Spring World Through New Eyes

On March  17^th, we packed up and headed to Orlando for the Disaster Recovery Journal’s annual Spring World event. Having just released our newest product, Teamstudio Continuity, the timing was perfect to attend the event and present to BCM practitioners the flexibility that a mobile business continuity application offers. This was the first time we attended the Spring World event, and it turned out to be a great success for us in more ways than one.

The first thing we noticed was that this is a friendly and welcoming community, as witnessed by the number of people who commented along the lines of “hey, you’re new here!” We’ve been exhibiting at conferences for more than 15 years (many of them in Orlando), and this is a new community for us, but we felt pretty much at home right away.

Attendees and exhibitors at the show were open and eager to share their experiences with us.  They were quick to engage us at the booth and seemed genuinely interested in learning about our product. This is not always true in a trade show environment and speaks to the overall openness of this community.

Speaking of openness, I was impressed with how open many of the speakers, most of whom were practitioners in large companies, were about some of the business continuity mistakes they have made in the past. One speaker described how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, he was skateboarding up 8^th Avenue in New York, searching for a cell phone signal, after having left his (paper-based) business continuity plan in a filing cabinet in his office. We couldn’t help but think about how a mobile, offline-enabled BCM solution like Teamstudio Continuity would have solved both these problems.

Our initial foray into the BCM world was a great experience. Some major takeaways included the need for new and innovative ways to make business continuity planning more reliable and accessible, and at the same time flexible. We learned that this community is strong and well grounded, and ready to take BCM programs to the next level. We had a great time making new friends and came away having learnt a lot.

Next up, we’re looking forward to the Annual Continuity Insights Management Conference in San Diego this April!

Nigel Cheshire 

Download our data sheet for more information about Teamstudio Continuity

[Video] Learn how to develop for mobile - Part 2 & 3

A few weeks ago we posted an article to our blog: "How to" Video series on Unplugged Controls Project". This post highlighted the released of our first video in the series. It provided an introduction to the Unplugged Controls Project and showed how to create a mobile version of some basic forms and views.

Parts 2 and 3 of this series are now available on the Teamstudio Youtube channel. Part 2 of the series extends the information provided in Part 1 -- to edit the form info and create new data. 

Part 3 shows how to display images and integrate camera functionality into your application. In this third video we look at how to integrate single photo attachments, as well as how to produce a swipe activated Lightbox gallery for multiple images. The example in this demo video allows you to create a basic visual address book, and the techniques can also be applied to any type of application that requires image upload (Insurance claims, expense reports etc).

After viewing these videos you will see that by using the Unplugged Controls, a developer can quickly and easily allow users to edit documents and add photos from their device album or from the camera directly (subject to the device capabilities). 

Let us know what else you'd like us to demonstrate. 

Teamstudio Tools - Edition 30 released!

Today we’re announcing the release of Teamstudio Tools – Edition 30! After 15 years and 29 major releases, Edition 30 offers the efficiency and streamlining opportunities you’ve come to love. In this release we’ve continued our integration with Domino Designer and also taken the opportunity to brush up the user interface with some enhancements, which will make for a better user experience. 

One of the biggest and most impactful changes you’ll notice is the replacement of the existing tree structure with a more visually appealing and user-friendly approach. The redesign of the structure is found throughout our products, including Analyzer, CIAO!, Configurator and Delta.

Looking at the Design Notes Tab in the Analyzer tool:

The checkbox next to the design element category will select/deselect all elements within the category. A visual indicator on the tab itself allows you to see exactly how many design notes Analyzer will be processing.

We’ve also made some changes to the creation of the analysis database. We’re trying to make it as streamlined as possible by avoiding the presentation of multiple dialogs for database creation.

The new tree structure can also be found in the CIAO! Main application window when the user selects View/Categorized View from the CIAO! menu.

Multiple design elements can be selected for many purposes such as check-in or check-out. Clicking on the plus sign next to the design categories expands only the desired category. This is especially helpful when selecting dependencies for a design element.  For example, if you’re working on a form and need to know which other design elements are dependent on the form. All of the dependent elements would be selected and appropriate categories expanded. Therefore preparing things for a check-out in the event of a major change. In addition to the new tree structure, the CIAO! product also underwent some performance enhancements which should be evident for all CIAO! users.  

Users will experience a more streamlined effect through the core Teamstudio tools as they all make use of this check-box/plus sign expansion behavior.

The Configurator product makes use of the new tree design as well, and it also boasts Eclipse integration with the Domino Designer. A user may now right-click on a database within the designer pane and choose Teamstudio Configurator.

Choosing Run Configurator will bring up the Configurator main dialog.  The user can also get to Configurator through the search dialog in Domino Designer:

Results of your search will be displayed in the search tab:

From here you may double click on each found item to bring up the Configurator replace dialog functionality.

In the E30 release of Teamstudio Tools we really focused on how to make the User experience better and more streamlined. We’ll continue to make ease of use enhancements to our products and we welcome any suggestions in this area. You can also look forward to many more integrations between Domino Designer and Teamstudio Tools products in the future.  

Teresa Deane 

Memorable Moments from Connect 2013

This year’s IBM Connect 2013 conference in Orlando, Florida was certainly not Teamstudio’s first year as an exhibitor. And being veterans of the show, we knew we wanted to make an impression on the showroom floor. So, we were happy to preview an early Beta version of the Teamstudio Continuity BCM system. There were eight Teamstudio people at the show and everyone had a copy of the Continuity app running on their iPhone, iPad or Android device. There were many Fortune 500 IT execs exploring the exhibition floor and few were allowed to escape without a Continuity demo.

Together with Continuity we showed off the latest version, v2.2 of the Unplugged mobile engine. This adds a number of key features, including camera support, so that users can take a photo using Unplugged – even if the device is offline – and upload it when the device syncs to the Unplugged server. 

On the Friday prior to the conference, IBM let us know that we’d won the 2013 IBM Collaboration Solutions Award for ‘Extending Social Collaboration to Mobile Devices”. Alistair Rennie, the General Manager of IBM’s CS business unit, presented Nigel and me with a crystal obelisk. The presentation was made on the 20^th floor of the Walt Disney Dolphin Hotel, which gave us a fine evening view of Disneyworld.

(L to R: Nigel Cheshire, Alistair Rennie, Steve Ives) 

All in all, a very successful event for Teamstudio. Now our developers are working hard to finish the shipping release of Continuity, which we plan to make available in the coming weeks. To learn more about our Continuity app, click here. 

 

Unplugged Mobile Controls play nice with Mobile Web Browsers

Version 1.2 of the Unplugged Mobile Controls is now available on OpenNTF. 

This release has a series of bug-fixes (thanks to those who reported these back to us), and one significant feature release: 

The Unplugged Mobile Controls now work with BOTH the Unplugged Product for off-line usage AND with regular Mobile Web Browsers. 

This was always a project goal, and now it’s a reality.

As the Unplugged product evolves, we'll continue to add support for more of the XPages Controls. For now, when designing Unplugged applications, only add controls that are supported. For controls that are currently not supported, we have workarounds posted on our support forum. 

The Unplugged Mobile Controls go a long way (in our humble opinion) to helping developers start to extend their Domino apps out to Mobile devices.

I'll be demoing some of these controls in the Teamstudio/TLCC Webinar this Thursday, February 28^th, and you can register here if you want to see them in action. 

 For more information: Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls

[Video] The Making of Unplugged

Three years ago, several of us here at Teamstudio were becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that it was really hard to get access to our corporate data while on the move. Being able to easily read our email and view our up-to-date calendars using the native applications on our mobile devices had spoiled us, and we were wondering why it was so hard to get the same level of access to other corporate data.

Then we noticed that many of our customers shared this frustration. What was it about the native email app on our mobile device that made it such a joy to use? Not the feature set, that's for sure. You can't use rich text, you can't email to a group, and the search feature is miserable! What is it that makes that app so popular then?

We realized that there are two things that make native apps on a mobile device much nicer to use than a web-based app. First, when you click on the email app, your inbox comes right up. You don't have to enter a web address, password, or anything else. Your inbox is right there. Second, it's always available, whether or not you have a network connection. These two features we call "instant-on, always-available" – two fundamental keys to usability on a mobile device.

We also wanted to make it easy for developers to build apps for their users. So we built Teamstudio Unplugged – a platform that makes it easy to build web apps with skills you already have, and apps work like the native apps you love -- instant-on, always-available. Seems like when it comes to mobile apps, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Check out our 2 minute animated clip about Unplugged.

Nigel Cheshire

"How To" Video Series on Unplugged Controls Project

Hopefully many of you are aware that we recently released a free Open Source Project called the ‘Unplugged Mobile Xpages Controls Project’ on OpenNTF (phew!). If not, you can read more about the release here.

We’ve just released the first in a series of educational videos, aimed at XPages developers, demonstrating how to use these controls and showing how fast you can start mobilizing your existing applications.

This first video introduces these controls and shows how to effectively drag and drop your way to mobilizing simple form and view data from an existing Notes app.

 

This video is a bit longer than we planned, as it includes an intro to these controls and how to download and install them. The next few will not be as long, but just as educational.

An important point to remember is that you do not need the Unplugged product to use these controls (beginning with Controls v1.2 to be released at month-end Feb 2013). They work on both Unplugged AND a mobile web browser, so you only need one code base to run real-time and off-line mobile apps.

Click here to watch now. 

If you have any comments on the video we’d be very interested in hearing what you think, just comment below. 

 For more information: Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls

The Launch of Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls

Last week we launched a new project in OpenNTF, the ‘Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls’. This project is designed to assist developers, who are new to either XPages or Mobile Development (or both), to streamline the creation of new XPages applications on the Unplugged platform, and to make it easier to mobilize existing Domino applications.

We’ve learned a lot over the last year and while our initial Unplugged release for Android and iOS was an open framework for developers to freely design pretty much what they want, in reality we’ve found that most Notes developers appreciate a helping hand in getting started transitioning to XPages, and certainly to mobile UI techniques.

The Controls (12 of them) are drag and droppable Custom Controls that provide standard UI components or perform standard functionality expected on a mobile device. These range from standard Header or Footer bars to high performance Search Controls (the Project Documentation has the full list with instructions).

By dragging these controls onto a XPage or two, and completing a few Custom Properties, mobile development of existing applications can literally be demonstrated in hours, not days.

Although these controls are really a starting point for Unplugged development, there’s no reason why you can’t continue to use the standard XPages supported controls and HTML 5 techniques to create rich mobile apps on Unplugged (we certainly don’t want to give the impression that this is the complete design limitation for Unplugged applications).

The design of each control is open, so if you want to change anything (colors, fonts etc) the CSS files are included and can be edited if required. For experienced developers, these Controls may be handy when performing common tasks where you don’t have your own widget already rolled. In general, the Controls are independent and have low dependencies, so if you only need one or two and prefer to use your own components, feel free, there should be no conflict.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing videos and blog entries to educate on how to use our new Controls and the benefits of each. Meanwhile, to see them at work, simply sync to our demo server. We applied the Controls to the Teamroom, Journal (Notebook) and Doc Lib Domino applications with test data. Either download Unplugged and tap ‘Yes’ to the option to ‘Sync with the demo server’ or reconfigure your current client to:

Server: unpluggeddemo.teamstudio.com
User: iOS User (or Android User for Android)
Password: password

We’re monitoring the OpenNTF ‘Feature Request’ and ‘Issue Tracking’ section so any feedback is greatly appreciated.

One last thing: A big shout out to both Matt White, who is the lead developer on this Project, and Mark Leusink, who contributed a version of his Debug Toolbar control from OpenNTF into a version compatible with Unplugged, which is also included in the Project (if you don’t know what this is, I’ll be blogging about this very soon). Not only are we extremely pleased with the end result, but working with these guys on this project was fun.

We’ll be at IBM Connect in a couple of weeks so if you have any burning questions come and find us [at the bar].

For more information: Unplugged XPages Mobile Controls