Perry Hoekstra

Recently, my mother-in-law decided to abandon her desktop personal computer/cellular datacard, trading it in for an iPhone as her main vehicle to stay in touch with relatives and to surf the web. Her decision was reinforced by the end of 3rd quarter mobile smartphone sales with mobile research sites reporting how the huge growth in […]

Jonathon Distad of Perficient’s Portal and Social Media national business unit recently commented in LinkedIn: “I have seen the windows 8 computer twice today and want to get rid of my iPad. The UI and nearly everything is better about it. My mother in law would even learn to use it without training. Realized how […]

Unless you have been living “off the grid”, it was difficult not to know that the rumors which have been swirling for months were true and Apple released a 7” iPad Mini.  Despite the opposition of such a device by the late Steve Jobs, Apple has seen the success of Android-based 7” tablets such as […]

The latest vendor who recognizes the significance of the mobile environment is Oracle who announced a version of their Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) for mobile applications called appropriately, ADF Mobile.  This cross-platform framework is not targeted at the general mobile programmer but instead Oracle is focusing on the enterprise Java developer who is familiar […]

If you took a poll of the mobile development teams out there, odds are that most of the teams are using some form of Agile development methodology practice.  One of the reasons is that the concept of Agile sprints fit very well into the update model that the mobile app market has defined. The sprints, […]

A report out the other day by an industry group that tracks shipments of flat panel screens (TVs to LDC monitors) has an interesting statistic in that the screen size for mobile phones has increased 38% in the past three years.  While the group took the average of mobile phone screen sizes, I took a […]

Gartner came a number of years ago with a graphical representation and explanation of how new technologies are adopted as solutions over time.  There is a period on the graph where new technologies have been overhyped and overpromised either by vendors or the technology community at large. Projects based on these cutting-edge technologies do not […]

The question is:  can mobile cross-platform frameworks be all things to all people? Dovetailing nicely into my previous post is an article that examines whether cross-platform mobile hybrid apps can meet both the objectives of time/cost and optimal user-experience. The history of cross-platform application development has been one of mostly failure and is littered with […]

On the heels of my blog the other day on the topic of iPads, tablets and The New Business Laptop comes an interesting report that only 1 out of 10 tablets sold actually have 3G capability.                         A couple of reasons have been put […]

It is tough to ignore the drumbeat of good Apple news in the past two weeks. The newly released iPad 3 sold (and that is sold/not shipped) over 3 million units in the space of 4 days.  The stock price briefly flirted with $600.00 (we are talking almost Berkshire Hathaway here) and all the finance […]

Like many industries, information technology moves from one “hot” technology to another.  Back in the mid-90s, the hot technology to have on your resume was the Java programming language and more importantly,  server-side Java with the requisite knowledge of application servers such as IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic and EJBs/servlets.  In the early 2000s, the […]

Someone at Google Android must be reading my blog.  Seriously though, Google just announced a website focused on aiding developers in the creation of smartphone applications for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).  The website will focus on features, design suggestions and approaches to different issues in Android  application development. This website will augment the current […]