Custom BI on iPad using Javascript

Introduction

After developing multiple iOS apps (SAP Note Viewer for iPad  (SAP Note Viewer for iPad) and iPhone  (SAP Note Viewer for iPhone), iOS CRM  (iOS CRM for SAP and iPad – A free Mobile CRM App)) I recently stumbled across one of my biggest hurdles so far (aside from learning Obj. C!) in creating a Sales dashboard within a native application. Charting and Graphing in business applications, including SAP, is a everyday necessity providing users, managers and CEO’s a visual representation of important, monotonous and a downright boring set of data. 

Dashboards, charts and graphs have become a common place within organizations and new releases of Business Objects BI 4, are making these easy to deploy, user friendly, interactive and can be very helpful in making game time decisions. Utilizing these visualizations from a mobile platform is something which is being actively developed ({code:html}Business Explorer for iPhone{code} for example) but currently there are very few plugins/frameworks/controls or libraries which make adding custom visualizations to your XCode project easy. A good example of some great looking charts in iOS would be Roambi  (http://www.roambi.com/). In my quest to solve this challenge I came across a solution which allowed me to mashup javascript and objective c creating a solution which is working fairly well so far and felt like some others developing on this “newish” platform might find helpful. While my solution does not come close to being comparative to products like Roambi, it does provide some tricks to making charting fairly simple for anyone wanting to do so. This post will be  read more

SAP Note Viewer for iPad

Firstly, thanks to everyone for the support of the SAP Note Viewer for iPhone of this app, users have really been growing steadily since its release and as of yesturday we had around 925 users. Feedback has been great and some really awesome ideas are coming from  the community.

The app is currently in the App Store and can be found here.

The app has the same features as the iPhone version which have been listed below, but the ipad really is considerably better for viewing the notes than the phone.

I dont anticipate the app to do as well just due to the number of iPads versus iPhones in the market, but hopefully it will make a select few peoples lives just a little bit easier. (My intention!) read more

DIY: IGUS Slider for Timelapse and Long Exposure Photography

This was a fun project using a Arduino, a sliding rail and belt to pull a sled with a DSLR on it for taking long exposure photography, video or long exposures. This was mounted on a Tripod for some additional stability and flexibility.

Here is the Code: Link

TODO: Photos/Footage