Fortess's Blog

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

fortess — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 12:52:38 +0000

We would like to thank our customers, partners and employees for another successful year.
We appreciate our cooperation and looking forward for fruitful 2011.

Sending all warm greeting and the best wishes from Siberia!

Halloween 2010

fortess — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:03:18 +0000

Once in a year casual dress code in Fortess is changed for Halloween one

Programmers look differently

But they always can expect for help and assistance…

…as fresh blood and antidepressants are available in large quantity

And the devil and his team …

…will tell you your future

Happy Halloween

Our “favorite” mobile platforms

fortess — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 04:37:53 +0000

Active marketing campaigns of Samsung, Apple, Research In Motion, Google and others creates more and more increasing demand for freshly new phones and therefore a need in relevant applications. But how many of those who want to move their apps to a new platform know that development cost of the same app on different platforms might vary in several times?
Here is nothing, but professional complains on those platforms we have been struggling with for a longer period because of their “raw” state or low organizational level of its producers.

BADA:

Not many standard components exist yet, many controls should be written from scratch
Many difficulties with getting approval from Samsung for a ready application; approval rules are changed frequently; what was allowed yesterday might not be allowed tomorrow
Many limitations of the platform cause limited functionality of applications e.g. problems in augmented reality, multitasking, etc.

Result: development cost is about 2-3 times higher than for Android or iPhone.

Blackberry:

Simulator and device behavior almost always differ
API is not well-thought, no normal layout manager, just a couple of primitives
there is no real API for work with browser
For every version of device/OS developers have to compile app separately, otherwise it crashes, for example when it can’t find the class which might be not needed on execution device
Development environment is quite complicated – several JDE versions are required, a whole bunch of simulators, integration of all this with Eclipse (native JDE is almost unusable) and one has to buy signature keys from Blackberry on top.
Every application signing attempt is followed by email from Blackberry, so get ready for heavy spamming during development process

Result: the same as for BADA
These complains for no extend should be considered as a demotivator to write apps on these platforms. Investments are higher and development lasts longer than for applications on another popular phones, but from the other hand, there are not many competitors yet on this market because of development difficulties. So if you really feel your app is worth of these efforts – challenge it!
P.S. what apps do you like?

HaRusel is open for public

fortess — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:14:39 +0000

HaRusel (Russian version) – our solution for human resource management is finally open for public.
The application still has room to be improved, but we love to use it internally. Please try and give us your feedback as we’re gonna release v2 soon with lot of new features, including localization into English.

Camping trip

yulianekhor — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:19:19 +0000

While a huge number of Russian districts are suffering from fires and abnormal heat, here in Siberia we finally managed to catch a warm day and went camping with colleagues at last weekend of August. Some of us even got tanned at a rare for this summer shiny day.

We started with hoisting the flag

Proper preparation is the must

Portable sauna for Siberians

Picking up mushrooms

Cooking the diner

Delicious barbecue