The AndPlus Blog

In ancient Roman mythology, Vulcan was the god of fire and metal smithery. It’s from his name that we get the word “volcano.” Much later, in Star Trek lore, Vulcan was the home planet of First Officer Spock of the starship Enterprise.

We talk a lot about virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) here at AndPlus, not only in this blog but also amongst ourselves and with our clients. These two related technologies are poised to spur some truly innovative, useful applications—and not just in the gaming and entertainment worlds.

Ask the average person on the street what IBM does, and you might get a blank stare, or perhaps “Didn’t they do that 'Jeopardy!’ thing a few years ago?” Once a household name whose mainframes, PCs, and typewriters could be found in nearly every large company around the world, IBM has mostly fallen off the pop culture radar in the last few years.

You’d better sit down for this.

Google has officially ended support for Chrome Apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of the Chrome browser. The Chrome App store is no more.

Shocking, isn’t it? Try to contain your disappointment.

If you’ve been in a bank lately, you’ve probably noticed there aren’t many tellers—perhaps two or three at any given time, tops. Many banks now encourage their customers to use ATMs instead for most of their banking needs. (Don’t weep for the bank tellers, though -- because of the phenomenal growth in the number of bank branches, there are actually more bank tellers employed in the U.S. than ever before.)

Continuing the flurry of posts here related to cross-platform development, we turn our attention now to yet another up-and-coming cross-platform technology: Electron. The Electron framework (formerly known as Atom Shell) enables developers to build desktop apps using standard Web tools: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.