Alpha Software Blog

Filter by Category
show all


Alpha CTO Dan Bricklin on "The Offline Problem"

Richard Rabins

Offline mobile business applications

Dealing with Disconnected Operation in a Mobile Business App: Issues and Techniques for Supporting Offline Usage

Exploring the Needs of One of the Top Concerns Relating to Business Use of Mobile Devices
I’ve been writing here in depth about some of the major issues related to business mobile apps. Last year I posted my "An Overview of HTML 5, PhoneGap, and Mobile Apps" essay. It explained the evolution of HTML into HTML5, and helped define various terms like "wrapped", "hybrid", "framework", and "web app." A few months later, I posted "Responsive Web App Design" to explore the issue of better supporting the wide variety of different mobile device configurations. This essay addresses one of the top concerns relating to business use of mobile devices: Operation when disconnected from the network. While these all come out of the work I do as CTO of Alpha Software to better understand the environment in which we are working, they are general essays not specific to Alpha’s products. Feel free to skim the headings and bold text for a quick introduction, however the details are important.

For the full article go to http://bricklin.com/offline.htm

(Stay tuned for Alpha Anywhere's upcoming and straight forward solution to the "offline problem." For more info please email richard@alphasoftware.com
Prev Post Image
Coming Soon. The Alpha Anywhere SaaS development framework.
Next Post Image
Displaying Data from Twitter-Alpha Anywhere With OAuth Authorization

About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

Comment