The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default

The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default

Mobile support in CSCW applications and groupware development frameworks

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today. CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices

Design and evaluation of a DASH-compliant second screen video player for live events in mobile scenarios

The huge diffusion of mobile devices is rapidly changing the way multimedia content is consumed. Mobile devices are often used as a second screen, providing complementary information on the content shown on the primary screen, as different camera angles in case of a sport event. The introduction of multiple camera angles poses many challenges with respect to guaranteeing a high Quality of Experience to the end user, especially when the live aspect, different devices and highly variable network conditions typical of mobile environments come into play. Due to the ability of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) protocols to dynamically adapt to bandwidth fluctuations, they are especially suited for the delivery of multimedia content in mobile environments. In HAS, each video is temporally segmented and stored in different quality levels. Rate adaptation heuristics, deployed at the video player, allow the most appropriate quality level to be dynamically requested, based on the current network conditions. Recently, a standardized solution has been proposed by the MPEG consortium, called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). We present in this paper a DASH-compliant iOS video player designed to support research on rate adaptation heuristics for live second screen scenarios in mobile environments. The video player allows to monitor the battery consumption and CPU usage of the mobile device and to provide this information to the heuristic. Live and Video-on-Demand streaming scenarios and real-time multi-video switching are supported as well. Quantitative results based on real 3G traces are reported on how the developed prototype has been used to benchmark two existing heuristics and to analyse the main aspects affecting battery lifetime in mobile video streaming

Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

Lessons learned from the design of a mobile multimedia system in the Moby Dick project

Recent advances in wireless networking technology and the exponential development of semiconductor technology have engendered a new paradigm of computing, called personal mobile computing or ubiquitous computing. This offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The research performed in the MOBY DICK project is about designing such a mobile multimedia system. This paper discusses the approach made in the MOBY DICK project to solve some of these problems, discusses its contributions, and accesses what was learned from the project