Adam is a co-founder and Principal Technical Consultant at Cantina and has over ten years experience in web application design and architecture as well as experience in multimedia production (audio and video) and delivery. At Cantina, Adam has been involved in every manner of project from CMS-driven marketing platforms and social networking communities to implementing an entire ecosystem for online video delivery including custom interactive video players, SEO-friendly video portals, backend ingestion pipelines, analytics, and mobile delivery on iPhone and Android particularly on the Brightcove platform. Prior to starting Cantina, he was a consultant at Molecular providing technical analysis, design, architecture, and implementation services for clients ranging from real estate organizations to large healthcare providers including Analog Devices, Colliers International, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and Fallon Community Community Health Plan. Adam holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as well as a Diploma in Sound Design for Visual Media from the Vancouver Film School.
With rare exception, just about everything we do at Cantina has at least one Apple product involved in one way or another. Macs, iPhones, iPads, iTunes, WebKit, the list goes on. Steve Jobs changed the way we work and the way we live our lives in so many ways, it’s hard to even enumerate them. [...]
Amazon announced their new tablet product this week, the Kindle Fire, which by all accounts looks to be a serious contender in the tablet space for consuming media (music, TV, movies, books) from Amazon’s growing empire of cloud based streaming services. The Fire runs a specialized version of Android tailored to finding and consuming Amazon [...]
In my earlier test driven-development post for Grails, the critically acclaimed Putting REST in your Tests for Grails (OK, maybe nobody read that except me while proofreading), I discussed an approach for automating integration tests when your Grails application has an external dependency on a web service, which in that case was the Brightcove Media [...]
We developers at Cantina collectively have tremendous respect for Paul Irish and his efforts to pull the web forward with the emerging standards related to HTML5 and his work with some of the leading tools to help developers embrace HTML5. When I saw his most recent blog post come across the Twitter wire… http://paulirish.com/2011/tiered-adaptive-front-end-experiences/ …I [...]
The article below has been making the rounds in the blogosphere, but I wanted to post it here as it includes some very poignant lessons on making the decision to deploy native applications built for specific mobile platforms or a web-based application that is deployed across many platforms. This is a decision that comes up [...]
I’ve been an ardent user of Apple products for many years now. While I don’t always agree with their approach to certain things, in general their approach lines up with my expectations for computing machines that try to get out of my way. Apple’s newest release of their desktop and laptop operating system, Mac OS [...]
Recently I’ve been grappling with building integration tests for a new Grails plugin that I’m working on that integrates with the Brightcove Media API, which is a mostly REST-ful web service provided by the platform. Details of the API can be found here. The API comes in 2 parts, a Read API for querying video [...]
The Android platform provides a great way to deliver rich and highly functional native mobile applications to an ever growing number of smartphone and tablet devices, and soon even your TV. With this platform comes a rich set of development tools, primarily based around the Eclipse development environment, but which also includes command line tools [...]
We tend to do a fair bit of analytics integrations for our clients, mainly in Google Analytics and Omniture. Both provide great features for tracking standard web site usage metrics, including page views, visits, entry/exit points, and more. Until recently, Omniture has had a leg up in one particular area of the analytics space, namely [...]
The changing dynamics of the web has been something we’ve talked a lot about lately. The shift toward real time services has impacted the way companies are thinking about the web. Twitter is currently leading the charge in the real time information and many people think it’s going to become the real time search engine [...]
Several market trends have been shaping the mobile services we offer at Cantina. The use of consumer technologies in the enterprise is increasing, including everything from Dropbox, social networks, Google apps, and mobile devices. Companies considering the deployment of business applications to the mobile context need to consider bring your own device (BYOD) strategies to [...]
