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The background behind the Alpha "video finder"

Richard Rabins
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In an earlier blog we talked about the new Responsive Application created in Alpha Anywhere and our CTO Dan Bricklin has written about "responsive application design" on his blog.

An example of responsive application design is our new application videos.alphasoftware.com which is designed to rapidly find the exact video or videos that you are looking for, from almost 1000 Alpha Anywhere videos. It should be noted that the application will respond and adapt to the device that you are running on - be it web or mobile and Alpha Anywhere will present the appropriate user interface to the user.

Application Notes

 

The Problem

  • Make it easy for developers to search through approximately one  thousand Alpha Anywhere  instructional videos to find specific video instructions on any topic of interest.
  • Must play at high resolution with minimal latency on both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Must be secure and offer an easy to use administrative front end.

The Solution

An adaptive custom application built with Alpha Anywhere and Microsoft SQL Server With Video Hosting and Streaming Handled By 3 Custom Video Components using API’s from Viddler, YouTube and Vimeo which provides redundancy should any one service experience network congestion, high latency or service failure.

Secure Admin Front

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Administrative UI lets you: Easily add, change, delete and search videos.

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Admin UI lets you add, edit delete topic details

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One topic may reference many videos

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App automatically adapts when launched on a mobile phone or tablet. Touch interface, momentum scrolling, programmable search buttons.

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Simple, programmable search buttons in the panel footer allow users to enter and save commonly used search terms.

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One topic may include multiple videos.

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Video can play within the app or full screen. iOS devices can display videos on external displays using  AirPlay.

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UI when launched from a desktop browser provides a rich, familiar interface based on an Alpha Grid Component.

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Instructional video played within a desktop browser.

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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.

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