digital partners_™ Apple Corporate Sales • Professional Systems Integrators

The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market is not [the cloud], but Apple. – Andrew Bartels

In his Global Tech Market Outlook for 2012, Andrew Bartels, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, focused not on the major shifts in Enterprise computing in the cloud, but that Apple is taking the workforce by storm.

This year Apple will sell an estimated $19 billion in Macs and iPads to enterprises. The growth marks a 58% increase over corporate spending in 2011. What was once a small trend with executives insisting on their own Macs, has now spread across departments. More and more employees are requesting to use the operating systems they use at home. The result? More Apple computers in the workplace.

The upsurge is also fueled by the demand for an increasingly mobile sales force. iPads have become the standard as corporations see how easily sales materials can be demonstrated as well as day-to-day operations managed on the go. Apple has reacted by ramping up corporate sales through reselling partners.

As an Apple reseller for close to twenty years, digital partners is uniquely positioned to use its longstanding relationship with Apple to help its clients get volume discounts. If your enterprise is playing catch up with integrating Macs and iPads, give us a call. Our systems engineers can answer questions about integration and our Apple specialists can help you find the right hardware for every position.

Every year successful companies take a fresh look at how they can improve practices and continue to grow. For most companies, no matter the industry, this is often work smarter, not harder. Being safe and streamlined is the result of smart thinking, not sweat-drenched work.

One place smart practices fuel growth is in enterprise data centers. Companies with electronic storage risk damaged equipment or injured technicians. Server boxes are bulky, often heavy, and cost thousands of dollars to replace.

With one easy addition to your server space arsenal, companies can lower operating costs, reduce risk of energy, and streamline server deployment. ServerLIFT solutions are designed to safely and efficiently lift servers and IT equipment in today’s data center environment. Both manual and fully controllable electric server lifts are available and have form factors designed specifically by data center employees to meet the toughest challenges with loading and unloading servers.

digital partners is a ServerLift authorized reseller and can work with your data center teams to find the best-fit server lift for your environment. This year, think smarter by eliminating extra risk and costs by adding the one tool that will aid your data management team to be more productive than ever. Give us a call to find out more or get a quote on the ServerLIFT SL-500X or the SL-300X.

A recent article from Forrester Research reviewed the challenges that Information Technology and Operations teams faced in 2011 and listed the growing challenges in the coming year. Concerns with transitions from local storage to backup in the Cloud, mobile device management, and hardware updates have moved to front and center for IT planning. Above all is the need for IT departments to demonstrate value.

As companies look ahead to appropriate budgets for 2012, it is important to focus not only on operations maintenance, but also on increased agility and mobility. Securing data across mobile devices like smart phones and iPads is essential. Your company’s digital assets should be easily accessible but only to those within the corporation. Our mobile device management (MDM) and security team work with companies to conduct MDM security audits and pre-assessments for MDM tools like MobileIron. Set up a beginning of the year review with digital partners to see how you can save money for all four quarters by securing and managing your mobile devices.

Updating systems with digital partners has never been easier. Through our strengthened relationships with Adobe, Autodesk, and Apple, we can help you build department-specific bundles with the hardware and software you need. Our service team can help you configure and deploy machines. Call dpi’s Enterprise specialists to find out more about beginning of the year specials and bundles.

Preparing for 2012 does not have to be difficult. Hardware refreshes and mobile device management are great value propositions. Contact digital partners for answers to your questions and some hands-on help.

The advanced class is used to cover concepts that exist in other development languages and how to do them in Objective-C and the mobile devices, as well as further interact with native capabilities of the device.  To ensure business logic processing does not cause sluggish or non-responding UI, asynchronous designs can be used to allow background calculation of data.  Most iOS devices also provide a camera for visual input / recording; the course will cover utilizing the camera to capture image or video and how to consume these media files in an application.

With wider availability of internet connection, either through Wi-Fi or 3G cellular connection, more people are connected than ever before.  Most applications can utilize these connections to get / store data and maybe provide connectivity and UI to existing portals that are available on the internet.  Such a connected application may need to be able to consume web services, show a website content within the confines of the developed application and maybe show a map with specific locations tagged along with current user location.

Subjects covered:

• Go through Grand Central Dispatch and asynchronous designs
• Providing contrast with threading and cover various situations on which path to choose
• Utilize the camera on iOS devices to capture images and video and how to show these media within the application
• Use UIWebView control to display websites and how to provide navigation
• Evaluate web service concepts and options available to produce web service and its output along with options to consume web services
• Consume Web Services within the mobile application
• Use MKMapView control to show Google Maps; contrast current user location within the map with the CLLocationManager class usage

Other advanced topics

There are various other topics that can be further explored related to iOS application development; the above classes can have their subjects tailored to satisfy the client’s need and preference.  As in any typical software development class, a subject is only important if it needs to be used by the application being developed; however having proper knowledge on most things and more importantly how to find / learn new subjects is crucial to the success of developing any type of application.

These following listed subjects are not specifically listed above but may be substituted and / or covered in lighter detail within the classes:

• Handling touch, multiple touches, keeping track of touches and handling gestures recognized by the system or by a custom handler
• Creation of UI custom controls to be reused within an application or other application in the development ecosystem, along with custom drawing routines using Quartz
• OpenGL ES development; this is crucial for 3D graphics-intensive applications and would be recommended to be a custom class by itself to cover OpenGL basics
• Control animation; providing a well-behaved UI is great, but sometimes a little extra ‘flash’ may be desirable to raise the application to the next level – block development will be covered as well as prior begin / commit animation methods.
• Instrumentation in Xcode; this is not strictly a development subject, but is helpful to optimize code and check for memory leaks in applications
• Exploring GameKit; the name does not strictly imply it is for development of games, rather it is for development of great social games.  It allows tapping into Game Center which is a centralized network service along with voice chat services and using Bluetooth to do peer-to-peer connectivity.
• Background tasks; it is not for doing more than a single action at a time, but rather to create an application that can continue to be active while another application is running.
• In-depth Objective-C; the language used to develop for iOS devices is not commonly available outside of the Apple platforms – some developers that would like to learn further may need a ‘pure’ language class.  This can be advantageous since it can be used to develop Mac applications as well.

Enroll today!

It’s easy to enroll. Just give us a call and let us know which course you’d like to take. We’ll take down your information and provide you with more details about the class and costs.

The intermediate class delves further to explore the capabilities of the device and various controls that can be used to provide better interaction with the mobile devices.  A typical message notification control is available as Alert View and Action Sheet and we will explore how to use these two constructs.  More sophisticated applications may require the use of more user interfaces to be shown / hidden / replaced in between operations – the class will cover the use of Navigation Controller and Tab Controller classes and how to tie the UI to work well together. With mobile devices, users or the application itself may want to use / display the application in a specific orientation, be it Portrait or Landscape. Most mobile applications will need to handle different orientations, but still ensures that it has a proper user interface.

Other than ensuring to provide a good UI to the user, an application needs to be able to manipulate data and properly retain / update them as appropriate.  A file-based storage system can be used, or the application can use SQLite to store and process more tabular / database oriented data.  As applications get more complex, usage and availability of memory becomes critical; unlike other modern high level languages, Objective-C requires a manual reference count system to ensure objects are properly disposed and its memory space reclaimed – comprehending this mechanism is critical to ensure a performing and well-behaved application.

Subjects covered:

• Using UIAlertView and UIActionSheet constructs within a mobile application
•  Manage, show and transition between multiple views using the UINavigationController and UITabController
• Handling device orientation changes and preserving a proper and working user interface with autosizing
• Taking a look at initializing and utilizing the gyroscope control on the device
• Explore the file structure and sandboxing restrictions when interacting / creating / storing files on iOS device
• Utilize the Sqlite3 embedded database engine to create, store and update tabular data
• Exploration of the manual reference-counting memory management mechanism used by Objective-C

Enroll today!

It’s easy to enroll. Just give us a call and let us know which course you’d like to take. We’ll take down your information and provide you with more details about the class and costs.

Intermediate courses are currently available on:

January 16-17 – full day -  9:00am-5:00pm
February 13-16 – 4 evenings – 5:30pm-8:00pm

The beginner class starts off with an overview of the Objective-C programming language, how it is different in comparison to other development languages, and a high-level walk through on using the Xcode development environment.  The class will then cover using the designer (Interface Builder) to arrange your application look and feel and how to work with the basic user interface controls that are available.  In developing the software, one design pattern is used repeatedly and is also supported by the development environment natively; the class will discuss the Model-View-Controller pattern and how it applies to the typical UI development for iOS devices.  The delegate pattern is also used throughout classes available in the SDK; understanding of this pattern is crucial to allow creation of future mobile applications.

Subjects covered:

• Overview of the Objective-C language
• Overview of project creation, maintenance and debugging within Xcode
• Using Interface Builder to design and lay out your application view
• Simple UI controls: Text field, Label, Button, Segmented Control, Switch, Image control, Slider, Progress bar, etc.
• Model-View-Controller pattern and how it is being used in creation of UIViewController classes in Xcode
• Correlation between the View and ViewController classes and how they interact and affect each other
• Coverage of the delegate pattern and how it is being used by the system to further allow interaction with UI controls and how it is being used for the initial start of the application.

Enroll today!

It’s easy to enroll. Just give us a call and let us know which course you’d like to take. We’ll take down your information and provide you with more details about the class and costs.

Beginner courses are currently available on:

January 9-10 – full day – 9:00am-5:00pm
February 6-9 – 4 evenings – 5:30pm-8:00pm