Category: Android

I Tried Using a Chromebook as My Main Computer, Here is What I Learned

November 19, 2019 / AlanJames1987 / 0 Comments

I use Linux as my main computer, Android on my phone, Windows to play games, OS X to program iOS apps, and iOS to run the apps that I program. I also have several Raspberry Pis running smart home code, like Octoprint, Nextcloud, Home Assistant on Debian. The house has a ton of devices with embedded operating systems, like Tasmota, or Android TV. I even have several computers running on AWS and Digital Ocean. Overall I think I have around 25 full computers and 25 embedded Arduino like computers to manage and maintain.

For years I’ve been searching for the perfect computer. One that is mobile, runs my Android apps, runs my Linux apps, has Google Assistant built in, etc. Something that allows me to manage all of my devices from one place and lets me develop.

So when ChromeOS started supporting Linux and Android I started paying attention.

Enable Developer Mode on Android

November 4, 2019 / AlanJames1987 / 0 Comments

Recently I’ve been consulting with a lot of startups employing several young and eager developers. My role has been to help with general architectural questions and be a source of knowledge on industry standards.

To that end I’m starting a series on less complex programming concepts focusing on mobile and server development. They will usually only cover one concept but will be good reference.

Best Sublime Plugins

September 21, 2015 / AlanJames1987 / 0 Comments

As you can tell from my lack of articles over the last several months I have been very busy. I’ve been in India and San Francisco working like crazy. I will be posting more about what I have been working on in the future, but because of work I have had no time to write any new or interesting articles.

So today I decided to share what Sublime plugins I use to be more productive, help unify my team’s standards, and help the overall collaboration in my team.

I’ve been using Sublime for several years but I was unimpressed when I first started using it. I later found out that the real advantage of using Sublime is the plugin system. You can make Sublime into nearly any type of IDE you want.

Here is my list of best Sublime plugins.

ECMAScript 6 has been Approved

June 20, 2015 / AlanJames1987 / 0 Comments

In the last several days I have been planning for a multi week work trip to India. In fact I’m writing this on the plane to London as it is the first chance I have had to write anything recently.

ECMAScript 6 has been approved!

It was approved on the 18th of June and brings with it many amazing new features. I’m sure I will be writing more about this in the future.

I’ll be celebrating 2 days late and over the Atlantic, but I will be celebrating none the less.

Cordova and Session Cookies

March 16, 2015 / AlanJames1987 / 6 Comments

As of Cordova 5.2.0 on Android 5.1 cookies are working.
I will be investigating other platforms, like iOS, soon.

I’ve talked many times about my love of Cordova. I like how I can use my existing knowledge and code to build a mobile application with additional abilities than a web application. While I know how to a write native Android application, I still prefer to do my initial prototyping and launch in Cordova.

I honestly like everything about Cordova aside from the fact that you can’t use cookie based sessions.

In this post I will show you how to do so in Express 4 using jQuery AJAX calls and some simple code.

Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android Lolipop

February 16, 2015 / AlanJames1987 / 2 Comments

I have posted about theming Cordova / PhoneGap to look like native Android before but at the time Android Lolipop and the Material design were not out.

Since then the world of Android has changed a lot. Google has created a new UI design which developers are using to design their applications. It’s nice looking, elegant, and simple.

But I’m not a great mobile developer. I can make Android do pretty much whatever I want, but it takes me substantially longer to write an Android application than it does for me to write a web application. Because of that I like to rapidly prototype my applications in Cordova first and sometimes keep them in Cordova because of the ability to have one codebase that covers multiple platforms.

But web applications always tend to look like web applications and not native.

That is what Materialize is trying to change, and doing a damn good job at.

Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android

August 25, 2014 / AlanJames1987 / 2 Comments

Cordova is a great platform for building native feeling mobile applications on Android and iOS with web technology like HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript. But what about the getting the native look out of these applications?

Obviously you have to use or write a CSS library which include all the UI components from the Android system and styles the appropriately.

Luckily developers have already created these types of frameworks and today I’m going to explore two of them for making web and Cordova applications look like native Android applications.

Personal Cloud Drive with ownCloud

May 10, 2014 / AlanJames1987 / 2 Comments

If you’ve ever used Dropbox or Google Drive you know what cloud based storage is. It’s a hard drive located somewhere on the internet for you to store and share your files.

But what if you have terabytes of files, or a preexisting server infrastructure at your work or house? Are those solutions really the best? Is there a better self hosted solution?

There is and it’s called ownCloud.

Making Mobile JavaScript Apps with Cordova

April 23, 2014 / AlanJames1987 / 4 Comments

Last time I covered what Node.js is and briefly covered creating server side JavaScript applications with it. But as part of my recent desire to write everything in JavaScript I have also started writing mobile applications in JavaScript using Cordova.

I’ve written mobile applications in various technolgies and even have some on the Google Play Store, but I like writing mobile applications in Cordova more than other technology I’ve used, which are Java and Flex with Adobe AIR.

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